THE STORY OF THE WEST SERIES 

EDITED BY RIPLEY HITCHCOCK 



THE STORY OF THE MINE 



yfte Story of m Ulest Series. 

Edited by Ripley Hitchcock. 

NO IV HE ADV. 

Cbe Story of tDe Ttiaidtu 

By George Bird Grinnell, author of •' Pawnee 
Hero Stories," " Blackfoot Lodge Tales," etc. 
i2mo. Cloth. Illustrated. $1.50. 

"A fascinating book." — London Speaker, 

" In every way worthy of an author who, as an authority upon 
the Western Indians, is second to none. A book full of color, 
abounding in observation, and remarkable in sustained interest; it 
is at the same time characterized by a grace of style which is rarely 
to be looked for in such a work, and which adds not a Uttlc to the 
charm of it." — London Daily Chronicle. 

" Only an author qualified by personal experience could offer 
us a profiuble study of a race so ahen from our own as is the In- 
dian in thought, feeling, and culture. Only long association -^-ith 
Indians can enable a white man measurably to comprehend their 
thoughts and enter into their feelings. Such association has been 
Mr. Grinnell's." — New York Sun. 

" Mr. Grinnell's book on the Indian is altogether the best pop- 
ular treatise on that subject that has ever appeared, and it records 
for the first time in connected form phases of life on this continent 
that have even now almost passed out of existence." — Boston 
Beacon. 

ClK Story of m mine. 

By Charles Howard Shinn. 

IN PREPARATION. 
The Story of the Trapper. By Gilbert Parker. 
The Story of the Cowboy. By E. Hough. 
The Story of the Soldier. By Capt. J. McB. Stembel, 

U. S. A. 
The Story of the Explorer. 
The Story of the Railroad. 

New York : D, APPLETON & CO., 72 Fifth Avenue. 




. \5 




At the Mouth of a Tunnel, Sierra Nevada Mine. 



THE STORY 
OF THE MINE 



AS ILLUSTRATED BY THE 
GREAT COMSTOCK LODE OF NEVADA 



BY 



CHARLES HOWARD SHINN 



ILLUSTRATED 




OCT SO^^^*^ 






!*£fWA8U 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1896 



^^\'^^' 



<5^ 



COPTRIOHT, 1898, 

By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 






6 3^*- 






EDITOE'S PEEFACE. 



In" accordance with the plan of the Story of the 
West Series for the presentation of the characteristic 
nhases and types offered by the evolution of the real 
vVest— the great country lying for the most part beyond 
the Missouri — Mr. Shinn, out of a singularly complete 
personal knowledge, tells in this volume The Story of 
the Mine. Like Mr. Grinnell, in his Story of the In- 
dian, Mr. Shinn does not aim at a comprehensive his- 
tory, but he illuminates its salient points. There are 
allusions in his pages which afford glimpses into this 
romantic and varied history from the Toltec legends, 
the Aztec discoveries, the fierce treasure hunts of the 
Spaniards, the desultory quests of later Anglo-Saxons, 
the epoch-maldng event at Sutter's Mill, the develop- 
ment of the great Comstock lode, and the feverish 
searching from the Sierra Madre to Alaska, which at 
one time and another has brought before the world 
the gold fields of Idaho or the blanket deposits of 
Tombstone, the rich silver ores of Lcadville or the 
wealth of Butte and Helena, the placers of California, 
or the silver of Cripple Creek. These glimpses show us 



vi THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

the figures of the prospector and the miner, types dif- 
ferent yet still closely related despite the vast modern 
changes in conditions and methods. By dwelling 
particularly upon the life history of one great lode, 
Mr. Shinn has succeeded in bringing these figures 
out in clear relief, and also in presenting some of the 
more significant aspects of the evolution of the mining 
industry. It is not easy for one who has camped with 
eager prospectors, who has followed the miner's candle 
through dark galleries and has seen the sharp contrasts 
of mining life, to introduce such a narrative as this 
without emphasizing, perhaps unduly, its romantic in- 
terest. That interest is constant, but there is also the 
interest belonging rightfully to a great industry which 
energy and science have developed to a high point of 
perfection. Nowhere else on this continent has this 
development been better illustrated than on the Com- 
stock lode. Nowhere else could the author have found 
a happier means of exemplifying the entire range of 
mining life. 

The picture of this life drawn by Mr. Shinn is of 
lasting as well as timely interest. He has not written 
to advocate any theory, nor to deal with any special 
issue. He has simply told the actual story, and it is such 
writing which is needed for a better understanding 
of the conditions met with, and the splendid energy 
and resourcefulness displayed in the building of our 
West. Within the last few years expansion westward 
has been checked and the reaction has brought prob- 



EDITOR'S PREFACE. vii 

lems which may seem serious, though no true Ameri- 
can can be doubtful as to the ultimate destiny of our 
country. Many of the typical figures of Western de- 
velopment have passed, and their preservation as his- 
torical types is the object of this series. The miner, 
though transformed in many ways, is a figure of the 
present as well as the past, and in presenting him and 
his work in this volume, Mr. Shinn has not only con- 
tributed to American history something of lasting 
value, but he has also furnished for those who some- 
times read between the lines another reason for pride 
in the qualities which have conquered this continent 
and an aid to the understanding and sympathy which 
make for a perfect national unity. 

EiPLEY Hitchcock. 



AUTHOE'S PEEFACE. 



IiT times when a dedication to some individual 
was thought as necessary a part of a completed book 
as the title page, I should have had serious trouble 
in choosing among the many who have helped me in 
the writing of this book. There are some now with us 
no more — genial J. Eoss Browne, honest Henry De 
Groot, thoughtful Dr. Gaily, and others — more than 
I have space to name. There are some who still live 
in this busy world, and who once helped to chronicle 
from day to day the life of the mining camp — Dan 
De Quille, the only real historian of the Comstock; 
Judge C. C. Goodwin, of Salt Lake; Arthur McEwen; 
our own Mark Twain; and Sam Davis, of Carson. 
Many other builders of iN'evada have helped in the 
preparation of this volume, from Mayor Sutro, of San 
Francisco, to scores of miners and prospectors. Prof. 
S. B. Christy, of the University of California, has kind- 
ly looked over the more technical chapters. Without 
venturing upon a formal inscription to any one, in 
these days when dedications appear a little out of 
place, I have, nevertheless, held in mind all the toil- 



X THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

ing frontiersmen of the world of miners. This vol- 
ume, therefore, is in essence, though not in name, 
dedicated to that vast body of men whose daily life 
it describes, and, not least among them, to that plain, 
lonely workman, the American Prospector. 

Charles Howard Shij?^!?-. 

NiLES, Califoenia, Septembery 1896. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER 

I. — Miners and mining camps 

II. — A LAND OP PRECIOUS METALS , 

III. — Mormon and pioneer gold . 
IV. — The placer-mining period . 
V. — The first quartz prospectors . 
VI. — Discovery op the Comstock . 
VII. — Placer mining on quartz ledges 
VIII. — The rush across the Sierras 
IX. — Old times in Virginia City. 
X. — Finding, testing, and working ores 
XI. — Great mechanical problems solved 
XII. — Dependent industries . 
XIII. — Mining litigation . 
XIV. — Stock and the stock speculators 

XV.— BORRASCA AND BONANZA . 

XVI. — Days op the great bonanza 
XVII. — The Sutro tunnel. 
XVIII. — Outside view op a mine 
XIX. — The city underground . 
XX. — The mining community . 
XXI. — The Comstock as it is . 
XXII.— The American miner of to-day 



PAGS 
1 



14 



26 

35 \/ 

43 

48 

61/ 

75 

90 
105 
123 
136 
154 
173 
194- 
009 
222 
239 
259 
267 



LIST OF illustratio:n's. 



FACING 
PAOB 



"z At the Moutei of a Tunnel, 

SiEURA Nevada Mine . . Frontispiece 

''Sutter's Mill 16 

y Hydraulic Mining 39 



si 



View of Virginia City 



V Interior of a Mill 80 

/Changing Shifts 04 

/a Group of Comstock Miners 110 

/On the Way to the Mine 130 

^Sectional Views of the Belcher Mine . . . 150 

/Eureka Mine 103 

/Down in a Gold Mine 182 

-/Entrance to the Sutro Tunnel, Sutro, Nevada . 205 

n/The Mouth of a Shaft 217 

V The Bottom of a Shaft 234 

yTreadwell Gold Mines, Douglas Island, Alaska . 260 



THE STORY OF THE MINE. 



CHAPTER I. 

MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 

This book is not a technical treatise upon the min- 
ing industry. It is only an attempt to describe in a 
clear and simple way some of the every-day features, 
as well as some of the unusual things, that belong to 
mines, keeping constantly in view the purely human 
elements of the story. 

Many writers go into the mining camps of the 
AVest and endeavour, after various fashions with 
varying degrees of success, to fix in words the changing 
life of those camps. More often than otherwise the 
resulting poem, story, or sketch rings false; it is over- 
wrought and passionate; it lacks the simple emo- 
tions; pistols and bandits abound in a nickel-novel 
atmosphere. Things that are on the surface of mining- 
camp life are easy to see, but no one can give even this 
a reality unless he understands the people and the occu- 
pation by that which is more than study — the sym- 
pathy and affection born from years of close fellowship. 

I remember an old Nevadan silver freighter who 

walked all day long for many successive weeks, month i^, 

and years beside his high ore wagon across the Nevada 

desert. He was one of brave old Dr. Gallv's com- 

1 



2 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

panions; lie had read those rough, breez}', genuinely 
frontier articles that " Single-line " used to publish in 
mountain newspapers; he knevv^ the whole IHad of the 
Nevada fighting editors by heart. I remember well 
how slow, simple, and methodical was this old Ameri- 
can silver freighter, patiently plodding back and forth 
over a land of desolation, placidly sorting out liis ideas 
until they were as sweet and real as Avinds from Sierra 
pine forests. 

Said he, one uiglit in camp, " I had an odd notion 
lately. I thought that perhaps one of these days, when 
all the frontiersmen have been dead a hundred thousand 
years, the stories that will be written and believed about 
them will be much like those of the demigods." My old 
freighter could have shown a college degree if he had 
cared to (which he never did), and he knew his my- 
thology as well as Leland knows liis gipsies. 

" Some fellow, I don't know who," the silver 
freighter continued, " has got to stand right out from 
the ruck some of these days to represent all the pioneer- 
ing that has been done by hundreds and thousands of 
us for generations on this continent. It might be a 
fellow with buckskins and Kentucky rifle, or another 
Tvdtli slouch hat and mule whip, or Doc. Gally's ' Big 
Jack Small,' the bull-puncher. 

" As I was saying, it might turn out to be a plain 
freighter. But the freighter is simply pacldng around 
some one else's ore. The miner is behind him, work- 
ing even harder. Out yonder, fifty miles in the 
desert, there's a man and his wife hammering the 
drill, blasting rock, opening their mine. Been there 
all by themselves for five or six j^ears. jMaybe their 
mine will peter out; maybe they'll die there, and some 
ore freighter will put them under the sand. 

" Yes, and behind the miner there's another fellow 



MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 3 

of the same sort, only more primitive. Sometimes I 
think he stands up taller than all of us put together. 
He is looking for ore, and he keeps on looking till he 
dies. When every mine has heen found, named, and 
worked, when the whole land is settled and has been 
fenced off into acre-lots and forties for ten thousand 
years, what kind of stories do you suppose men will 
be telling their children about the Mneteenth-Century 
Prospector? " 

My old silver freighter leaned silent on his whip- 
stock. Ijonely, toiling men and women of countless 
mining camps, not only in America but all over the 
world and ever since the bronze age began, seemed 
to become but voices that mingled in one great chorus 
as the separate parts of the ship in Kipling's story 
found, by losing themselves, the Voice o^ the "Whole. 
We stood side by side, and both of us were thinking of 
the myth spirit which works continually among men, 
but only at long intervals reaches full achievement. 
The goddess of myths has not chosen among the found- 
ers of the American colonies, splendid though their vic- 
tories were; nor has she taken the buckskin-clad 
Boones and Crocketts, for even these, though unique, 
lack something of the universal. It will not be trapper, 
or hunter, or mountain guide, or Eemington's virile 
horsemen, noble and eloquent types though all these 
certainly are. 

But what is more likely, when one considers the 
settlement of the far West, than that a myth of the 
miner shall grow, unseen, and find ultimate expression 
in art, song, and literature? The hills will some day 
be empty of gold. The waters will reclaim the deserts. 
New and strange conditions of life will prevail over all 
the lands between Atlantic and Pacific. But the groat 
myth story of the West will have to do with some Titan 



4 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

of Sierras or EocMes, leaning upon his mighty pick, as 
Thor upon his Mjolnir. Strong and lonely as a grizzly, 
the prospector will " stand right out," in the words of 
the silver freighter, " to represent all the pioneers." 

Far enough are we from any immediate apotheosis 
of the much-enduring miner, who is the last of men to 
magnify his calling. If, now, we endeavour to select 
some group of mines, or some mining period of especial 
importance, which shall fitly illustrate the more bril- 
liant achievements of miners, we shall have many claim- 
ants to consider. One might even find great and char- 
acteristic groups of classic mines in Mexico and South 
America, such as the Sierra Madre with its authenti- 
cated yield of more than $800,000,000, or the still more 
famous Potosi, which in three and a half centuries 
poured forth about $1,400,000,000 in gold and silver. 
The Spanish American is a little-understood fellow- 
creature, Avith an especially " good nose for silver," as 
the saying goes. Some one will come along, sooner 
or later, who has carried ore in rawhide bags up the slip- 
pery, notched posts that the Mexicans call ladders, who 
has summered and wintered with Jose and Juan, and 
who knows their pet superstitions, their hereditary and 
acquired mine lore. Then we shall have the quaint 
and pretty story of the Mexican mine, but the story 
herein told must keep to more familiar ground. 

In the United States there has never been a more 
dramatic episode than the Californian gold rush of 
1 848-' 50 — an episode that is in its way unique, the 
very epitome of the whole history of placer mining. 
After California were the gold placers of Colorado, 
Idaho, and [Montana — the days of Pike's Peak, Salmon 
Elver, and golden Helena. As trained prospectors 
continued to explore the Sierras, the Eocldes, and other 
mountains of N'orth America, these were followed in 



MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 5 

swift succession by many equally important mineral 
discoveries. Then came the news of the famous fis- 
sure veins of " King Solomon Mountain/^ Ouray, and 
the whole wild San Juan region, first entered by that 
brave old prospector, John Baker, in 1860, but opened 
to the miners in 1873. Next, still- thriving Leadville 
won renown, with its " six log cabins '^ of August, 1877, 
and its "thirty-four huge smelters" of December, 
1879. Work had hardly begun on the Leadville carbon- 
ates before Eichard Gird and the Scheifielin Broth- 
ers were astonishing the mining world with the rich 
chlorides, carbonates, and horn-silver of Tombstone. 

The glories of many of these earlier camps have 
somewhat paled in recent years before the sudden and 
splendid records of new groups of mines, such as 
Cripple Creek and other frontier camps. Within the 
past five years more than a hundred promising new 
camps, some of them extremely profitable from " grass 
roots down," have been established all the way from 
the Mexican borders to the Yukon and its tributaries. 

Nor has it been in the United States alone that 
mining for the precious metals has greatly increased 
in importance. The world's average yearly yield of 
gold alone during the first half of the century was only 
about $16,000,000, but the statisticians tell us that in 
1895 about $205,000,000 in gold was taken from the 
mines. The details of this extraordinary increase in 
the world's mine-yield belong to the history of colonies, 
states, and nations. A few of the more striking re- 
sults can be given here. Eussia, owing to Siberian dis- 
coveries, turned out $34,000,000 in gold last year, the 
highest amount in her records. Australasia has in- 
creased its output from $25,000,000 in 1887 to $44,- 
000,000 in 1895. The total yield of Africa was about 
the same last year as that of Australasia. New mines 



6 THE STORY OF THE MIXE. 

are rapidly making records all the way from Patagonia 
to British Columbia. Even now syndicates are en- 
deavouring to obtain entry into the mineral districts 
of China^ hoping to find another California. 

While this book was being written, mining interests 
the world over were each day more potent factors in 
the social, industrial, and political life of the nations. 
New captains of industry have come to the front in 
lands which five years ago were strange names in the 
ears of men. Frontier battles have been fought, the 
world's peace has been seriously threatened, the whole 
complex machinery of modern diplomacy has been 
set in motion to avert disaster, and through it all one 
hears the vibratory ring of the miner's drill, uncover- 
ing hidden ledges in Africa, Asia, South America, and 
rousing the fierce gold hunger of mankind. Plot and 
counterplot shake the secret places of the earth to- 
day, and, for a time at least, the central figure of it 
all is the prospector, going forth to strike again the 
ke3rQote of Spain, of California, of Australia, of South 
Africa; to find and conquer a desert, waste and terrible; 
to build cities, and carry farmers to unpeopled valleys; 
to give to the new land railroads, fleets of ships, mounted 
police, armies, legislatures — and then to fling it down, 
one more colony or commonwealth, whose corner stone 
is based on quartz, and to go on into some untrodden 
wilderness. 

What a strange and brilliant procession of bankers, 
lawyers, speculators, politicians, statesmen, cabinet 
ministers, lords and ladies of high degree, princes of 
blood royal, presidents and monarchs are, even now, 
pressing with reckless haste on the trail of the flannel- 
shirted prospector! 'No great artist has ever painted a 
picture of this wild procession, storming so fiercely 
into newly discovered groups of mining camps. Each 



MINERS AND MINING CAMPS. 7 

generation would have different figures made promi- 
nent, but there would always be the camp followers, 
the outriders, the dead and dying, the utmost follies, 
the darkest crimes, the noblest self-sacrifices. Limit- 
less avarice, Timon-like hate, courage great as that of 
the gods themselves, are in the unending march. Some 
few loom up along its changing lines, the briefly wor- 
shipped, the swiftly forgotten, of each fierce gold 
rush. Once it was some nameless Phoenician specu- 
lator, some Eoman who farmed out half the mines 
of Spain, some successful free-lance adventurer from 
India or Brazil. History has kept scant record of the 
thousands of Rhodeses and Barnatos, of I. D. B. rob- 
beries, of outlanders and of chartered companies, the 
men who rose and fell, singly or in groups, ceaseless 
and changing as the waves of ocean, age after age, while 
the miner moved on from camp to camp with tliis mul- 
titudinous army roaring sealike in his wake. 



CHAPTER II. 

A LAND OF PKECIOUS METALS. 

As it happens, there is one place in America where 
mining for the precious metals has been carried on 
upon so grand a scale and under such stupendous dif- 
ficulties that the results of the struggle with Nature's 
forces have greatly affected the mining interests of the 
world. Whether we consider the Comstock vein of 
Nevada from the standpoint of its mineral yield, or 
study the dramatic elements in its strange history, the 
group of mines along its course is typical, in the most 
complete sense, of the dangers and vicissitudes of min- 
ing life. The term " Comstocker " is known in every 
country and in every language; the Comstock miner is 
everywhere recognised as a post-graduate among miners 
of other camps. World-famous mining engineers have 
taxed their utmost sldll in the service of the Comstock; 
the greatest geologists have given laborious days to 
the study of its marvels; travellers have gazed upon 
its mighty engines and threaded its vast underground 
cities; metropoKses have been stirred to their pro- 
f oundest depths by mining news from Comstock bonan- 
zas. The reports of the IJnited States Geological Sur- 
vey sum up many laborious volumes about the Com- 
stock by such statements as these: ^^ Contributions of 
the first importance to mining science have been fur- 
nished/' " Through contentions of its rival locators, 
our national mining legislation was mainly shaped." 



A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. 9 

" No subsequent discoveries can rival the influence of 
the lode/*' 

Nevada, the country of the Comstock, is a part of 
the wonderful plateau known as the " Great Basin/' 
lying between the Eockies and the Sierra Nevadas. I 
am indebted to Mr. S. T. Gage, of California, for 
knowledge of a remarkable prophecy made by Horace 
Greeley respecting this then-neglected region, in a 
speech delivered on the plaza of Placerville in the sum- 
mer of 1859. 

Toward the close of his address came these sen- 
tences: " Lastly, I have come across a desolate and ter- 
rible country, a land seemingly worthless forever — the 
Great American Desert. But I believe that the Al- 
mighty has created nothing in vain, and as I have 
passed over this awful region, the thought has fixed 
itself in my mind that, since it is certainly useless for 
every other purpose, it may be a land of vast mineral 
wealth. If that be so, it will take a hundred thousand 
Californian miners a hundred thousand years even to 
prospect it." 

The rugged plateau to which Greeley alluded is 
from two to five thousand feet above the sea, and 
is between five and six hundred miles wide, becom- 
ing more narrow and sinldng toward the north and 
south. Nevada, a large part of Utah, and parts of Ore- 
gon and California are included within its limits. The 
Great Basin, whose rims are the Sierra Nevada, the 
Wahsatch, and the Blue Mountains of Oregon, is 
crossed by mountains that divide it into a group of 
lesser basins, such as the Humboldt, the Washoe, the 
Carson, and the Walker. Even the valleys of the 
higher portion of the plateau are five and six thousand 
feet above the sea, while the greater mountain peaks 
rise five thousand feet more. 



10 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

There are extensive deserts in the Great Basin, ex- 
amples of which are the famous Death Valley, the 
Black Eock Desert, the Sage Desert, the Desert of the 
Colorado sloping south and west, the Forty-Mile Desert 
of the Humboldt region, and the Bitter Water district 
of the Armagosa. Everywhere are alkali plains spotted 
with scanty bunch grass and miles of basaltic rock, 
where a few stunted junipers and thorny cacti grow. 
Horned toads, lizards, scorpions, tarantulas, brush rab- 
bits, sage hens, and innumerable crickets were about 
all the living creatures that the pioneers found as they 
toiled painfully across the deserts on their way to Ore- 
gon and California. 

During ancient geologic periods, when the Eockies 
and the Sierras were being slowly uplifted from the 
ocean, an immense area of deep seas holding minerals in 
solution were for a time inclosed in the Great Basin, and 
beds of salt, sulphur, mica, borax, soda, arsenic, man- 
ganese, and other minerals deposited in water, remain 
as relics of that inland ocean. If the basin thus formed 
had contained no other mountains, the great desert 
would have been nearly or quite impassable for many 
years, and the development and history of the United 
States would have been seriously modified by a Sahara 
between the Mississippi Yalley and the Pacific coast. 

The problem of the method of ore distribution has 
interested leading geologists. According to Baron 
Eichtofen, immense floods of fluid matter from under- 
crushed and folded strata of rock were slowly forced 
out through fissures during the gigantic processes of 
mountain creation. What Prof. Joseph Le Conte calls 
the " submountain reservoir " of fused matter thus sup- 
plied the sheets of lava many feet thick that occur in 
the Great Basin. The contents of the metalliferous 
veins were deposited by hot alkaline waters that came 



A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. H 

up through fissures with various minerals in solution. 
There are many different classes of mineral-bearing 
veins of rock, but the desire of the quartz miner is to 
find a " true fissure vein.^^ By this he means one of the 
great breaks or fissures caused by a movement of the 
earth^s crust and filled with ores — that is, with slowly 
deposited mineral substances. Such fissure veins are 
often very wide, of an immense depth, and occur in 
parallel groups. 

The mountain system, more closely examined, grid- 
irons the country with a hundred ranges from fifty to 
a hundred miles long. They rise three or four thou- 
sand feet above the plateau, the passes through them 
are often high and difficult, and many an isolated val- 
ley, remote from civilization, lies between their peaks. 
History is written in the strange names of these moun- 
tain chains. Some carry the trade-mark of the Ameri- 
can trapper or prospector, as Carson, Buckskin, Muddy, 
and Pancake; others are Spanish, as Cortez, Pinon, 
and Vegas; but by far the greatest number are Indian, 
as Washoe, Toano, Shoshone, Toiyabe, Toquina, Wah- 
satch, and Pahranagat. Between the dark, treeless, and 
forbidding mountain ranges are narrow plains or val- 
leys, some only a mile wide. The melting snows keep 
the grass green in the ravines and supply occasional 
springs and rivulets along the bases of the mountains, 
which unite in a few small rivers, every one of which, ex- 
cepting the Eio Virgin and the Owyhee, soon disappears 
in the ground or in some lake or depression called a 
sink. 

The earliest maps of the Great Basin and the tradi- 
tions of Spanish explorers are only important as they 
serve to show the source of later misconceptions on tlie 
part of traders and colonists. The eTohn Harris map of 
1605 " seems to give," says Bancroft, " the name Qui- 



12 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

vira to a vast region which embraces Nevada in com- 
mon ^yith other undefined countries/^ In this map 
Cahfornia is the island of Nova Albion. On the main- 
land, larger than Lake Superior, was the Lake of 
Thongo, from which two great rivers fl.owed to the 
Pacific. Most of its errors were perpetuated in Finley's 
map of 1826. According to such maps, the journey 
from the western base of the Rockies was through a 
comparatively level and well-watered country. The 
wandering trappers knew better than this, and map- 
makers would have done well to consult rough old Jim 
Bridger, Captain Ashley, or such leaders of the Hud- 
son Bay Company as Peter Ogden, who was trapping 
on the OT\Thee and the Humboldt long before Finley 
published his famous map. 

But the trappers left little or no record of their 
wanderings, although they crossed the Sierras to the 
Spanish settlements, and named many a mountain peak 
and alpine pass in the years between 1825 and 1840. 
Walker, the guide, heroic William Sublette, Eat Car- 
son, Captain Wyatt, Jedediah S. Smith, and nameless 
free trappers were adventurers in the Great Basin, and 
some of them soon carried back stories of placer gold, 
or even showed flakes of the precious metal when they 
wintered at the noisy frontier posts of the Eockies. 
For the most part, however, their tales were of suffer- 
ing and disaster, of thirst and hunger in the deserts, 
and of hair-breadth escapes from hostile beasts and 
men. 

After Fremont's explorations in 1844 and 1-^45 the 
main lines of travel were fairly well mapped out, and 
immigration went on with hardly a pause. The nomads 
of the Great Basin saw their hunting grounds invaded 
by longer lines of wagons and larger camps of white 
men. By 1847 the trails of the trappers had become 



A LAND OF PRECIOUS METALS. 13 

such pathways that no guide was needed. Books, maps, 
and newspaper articles began to be published, giving 
directions to emigrants; signboards were put up at 
some of the points where roads divided. Elvers of 
changing life were flowing out of the Mississippi Valley 
toward the Columbia and the Golden Gate. 

The fateful year 1848 brought the discovery of gold 
in Marshall's mill-sluice, and in an hour after the news 
went abroad the number of overland emigrants began 
to multiply. The beaten track became a broad high- 
way, strewn with wrecks of wagons and bones of horses 
and cattle. Whole families took the long and toilsome 
journey through Salt Lake Valley, where the Mormon 
faith was established, and across deserts and mountains, 
day after day, week after week, until the crest of the 
Sierras was reached and every river flowed to the Pa- 
cific. One and all were gold seekers going to the 
California placers to make their fortunes. Their 
thoughts and talk were often of mining and miners. 
Yet these thousands of immigrants made camp after 
camp in what is now Nevada without dreaming that 
precious metals were hidden within easy reach! 



CHAPTER III. 

MOEMON AND PIONEER GOLD. 

"While eager miners were exploring the ridges and 
canons of tlie western Sierras, the Latter-Day Saints, 
or Mormons, recognising the profound significance of 
the conqnest of Cahfornia and the discovery of placer 
gold, were making a gigantic effort to claim and con- 
quer that great inland empire which they named the 
State of Deseret. The miner, whom they had learned 
to fear, had crossed this vast and imdeveloped region, 
had pitched his tents where Mormon leaders were 
dreaming of a fnture seacoast possession. There was 
to be a struggle for that which remained. The famous 
State of Deseret, organized March 18, 1849, contained 
Utah, !N'evada, Arizona, parts of Wyoming, Oregon, and 
Colorado, and nearly half of California, including San 
Diego Bay. Hundreds of the most prosperous mining 
camps of America lie within this huge circle. 

The Mormon Church, after claiming this enormous 
domain, began to strengthen its outside colonies and 
established many others, to acquire political influence 
in new communities. It is easy to see that if the war 
with Mexico had been delayed a few years longer there 
might have been another independent State besides 
Texas, carved from Mexican territory, and treating 
with the United States of America as with a foreign 
power. 

14 



MORMON AND PIONEER GOLD. 15 

Immediately after organizing tlieir new State the 
Mormons sent an expedition of eighty men into the 
western country, some of whom built a log cabin at 
" Mormon Station," in Carson Valley. After complet- 
ing the " first American house in Nevada " they crossed 
over the Sierras and bought their suplies, also provi- 
sions to sell to the immigrants. Eeturning, they sold out 
the cargo and made a second trip to California before 
winter. None of these men were miners, but Beatie, 
the founder of this first trading station, says in his 
manuscript narrative, in the Bancroft Library, that in 
1849, while he was in California buying supplies, one of 
the men left at the station washed out a little gold in the 
gulches near Carson Valley. On his second trip the 
news was told to some Mormon miners, and in the 
spring of 1850 m^en crossed the Sierras to prospect for 
placers. 

But the real beginning of placer mining was early 
in 1850, when a Mormon emigrant train on the way to 
California camped in Carson Valley to recruit their 
animals, and several of the party made a prospecting 
tour along the river and its tributaries. Near the site 
of the present town of Dayton, at the mouth of Gold 
Canon, they found gold, though not in large quanti- 
ties. The details of this discovery are interesting. On 
May 15th William Prouse " took a tin milk pan, went 
down to the creek, and washed out a little of the sur- 
face dirt." If there had been any prospectors in the 
party the riches of Gold Cafion would have been dis- 
covered in a short time from this clew, but the Mor- 
mons only saw the ashen-hued, barren land which they 
were anxious to leave; they went on, but found the 
great Snowy Eange, as they called the Sierras, still im- 
passable, and so they turned back to their former camp. 
John Orr and Nicholas Kelly now named the ravine 



16 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Gold Caiion, and they spent three weeks looking for 
the precious metal. On June 1st, Orr " thrust a butcher 
knife into a crevice at the edge of a small cascade '' and 
pried out a nugget worth perhaps ten dollars. A few 
da3^s later the whole company packed up and crossed 
the Sierras. 

Whether Prouse and Orr told others or not, the 
news of the discovery somehow crept abroad. In 
August some immigrants camping in the valley saw a 
train of Mexicans with mules and wooden bowls, pro- 
visions and miners' tools, crossing the hills to Gold 
Canon. Two American boys among the immigrants 
followed the Mexicans and found that Don Ignacio 
Paredes was the chief, and that the party was originally 
from Sonora, Mexico, but had recently come from Cali- 
fornia. Provisions were so costly, however (flour being 
$1.50 a pound), that several small groups of miners 
who tried to work the Gold Canon placers abandoned 
the region in 1850. Nevertheless, this discovery led 
in time to the discovery of the Comstock lode, for Gold 
Canon heads far up the side of Mount Davidson, and 
the metal it contained came from the wash and over- 
flow of the great fissure vein. 

Congress had meantime refused to accept the de- 
sired Deseret boundaries, but Utah Territory, as organ- 
ized September 9, 1850, extended from the Eocldes to 
California, including the whole of what is now I^evada. 
The latter region soon became known as Western Utah, 
and, separated as it was from the Salt Lake Valley by 
mountains and deserts, it presented serious problems 
to the Mormon leaders. Many of the settlers they sent 
out crossed into the California placers, or became slack 
in their allegiance to the Church. Every effort was 
made to establish permanent settlements and gather 
farmers about the rude trading posts, but the load- 




Sutter's Mill. 
From a Print of the Time. 



MORMON AND PIONEER GOLD. 17 

stone of the mines was too strong, and by the autumn 
of 1850 all the Mormons who were not swinging rockers 
in Gold Canon moved on to California, while Indians 
burned the deserted cabins. 

Another attempt to hold the country was made in 
the spring 'of 1851. Colonel John Keese, leading a 
well-equipped party of colonists into the upper Carson 
Valley, re-established a trading post on the site of the 
first Mormon station. They bought a piece of land 
from Captain Jim, the Washoe chief, for two sacks of 
flour, and made a fifteen-foot stockade of cottonwood 
logs, inclosing an acre. Inside of this they constructed 
a log house as a fort, trading post, and dwelling, the 
only permanent dwelling in Western Utah. One would 
think that now, at last, the Mormons had a good foot- 
hold. 

^Nevertheless, the newcomers soon felt the spirit of 
speculation. First one, then another strayed up Gold 
Canon, and in a few months most of them were in the 
camps. One of these was a feather-brained, bibulous 
teamster, whom Eeese had picked up in Salt Lake — 
James Finney, or Fennimore, afterward widely known 
as " Old Virginia," and one of the discoverers of the 
Comstock lode. Captain Eeese's expedition, from 
which so much had been expected by the Mormons, 
had done little except to bring still more miners into 
the country. 

The scattered placer camps of Western Utah at this 
period were very simple in organization. N'one of the 
miners acknowledged any Mormon officers. Their rude 
and brief laws respecting claims were similar to those 
of the California placers. Rockers and long toms were 
used. In the autumn and spring there were sometimes 
two hundred men in Gold Caiion, but by June of each 
year water was scarce and the place was nearly deserted. 



18 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Then the miners went down to Mormon trading posts 
and spent their money. 

We have from pioneer chronicles a picturesque 
ghmpse of life near one of the camps of the period. It 
was on the last night of the year 1853. There was a 
dance " in the log house, over SpaSord Hall's store," at 
the mouth of Gold Canon. Nine women were there, 
including a girl of ten, and one of the nine was Princess 
Sarah Winnemucca, the only Indian woman who min- 
gled socially with the whites. The men numbered over 
frontier store keepers, there were miners from the 
gulches — Oregonians, Californians, apostate Mormons, 
and winter-bound immigrants — every stroke of whose 
picks brought the day nearer when mining men should 
rule ISTevada. All night long the dance continued in 
SpaSord Hall's log house, and while the festivities were 
at their height the Washoe Indians stole every horse in 
the settlement. 

The Mormons in 1856 made their last efforts at 
aggressive colonization, sending sixty to seventy fami- 
lies to Carson Valley, and smaller parties to other por- 
tions of Nevada. Arriving before local elections, and 
being well organized, they placed Mormons in nearly 
every office. The miners held squatter meetings, and 
began to talk about secession from Utah. While things 
hung thus uncertain, Brigham Young, in 1857, sud- 
denly abandoned the struggle, partly because Salt Lake 
had trouble of its own, partly because the astonish- 
ing growth of California seemed to nullify all his 
efforts along the eastern base of the Sierras. He 
sent out messengers, and peremptorily recalled every 
Mormon in Western Utah. Some fifty-four families in 
Carson Valley left their cabins, sawmills, claims, water 
ditches, and property of every sort, giving it away or 
selling at a ruinous sacrifice, and returned to Salt 



MORMON AND PIONEER GOLD. 19 

Lake. The entire number of Mormons who left West- 
ern Utah was four hundred and fifty, in one hundred 
and twenty-three wagons, and they were on their way 
to Salt Lake within three weeks after the mounted 
messengers arrived with the commands of the Prophet. 
Some of the little settlements were nearly depopulated 
for a time, until " gentiles and apostates ^^ had filled 
the vacant places. 

Orson Hyde, the apostle, years later, when the Com- 
stock miners had made all ]!^evada property extremely 
valuable, wrote to the then owners of a sawmill he had 
built in "Wassau," now Washoe Valley, saying that 
unless they restored it at once (which they never did) 
the curse of the Almighty would utterly destroy them. 
'^ This demand of ours remaining uncancelled shall be 
to the people of Carson and Wassau Valleys as was the 
Ark of God among the Philistines. You shall be visited 
of the Lord of Hosts with thunder and with earth- 
quakes, with floods, with pestilence, and with famine, 
until your names are not known among men." 

Carson County, thus abandoned by the Mormons, 
was for a time left without a government. Great Salt 
Lake County, eight hundred miles distant, claimed 
jurisdiction for " election, revenue, and judicial pur- 
poses," and was ordered by the Utah Legislature to take 
possession of all the records and documents. The 
people then drew up an earnest memorial to Congress. 
Even in the summer time, they said, they were desti- 
tute of all power of enjoying the benefits of the govern- 
ments of TJtah or California, while in the winter com- 
munication was frequently cut off for several months. 
" Outlaws, criminals, and convicts abound, and the 
region is only saved from anarchy by an occasional ses- 
sion of Judge Lynch's Court." 

The placer miners in Gold Cailon were entirely in- 
3 



20 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

different to the departure of the Mormons. They 
Avorked on, washing auriferous gravel from the bars, 
or carrying rich earth from dry ravines to the nearest 
stream. They lived in little brush huts, or tents, in 
summer, and in cabins of rough stone in winter. Gam- 
bHng and drinking were the only amusements. The 
work was very hard and monotonous. Often men 
hardly made a living. Until a mill was built in Car- 
son Yalley, the price of flour was apt to go very high in 
the winter — as high as two and a half dollars a pound. 
By 1855 this price had fallen to fifteen cents, and pota- 
toes, which once sold for a dollar a pound, could be 
had for five cents. 

At times the miners suffered greatly from lack 
of the necessaries of life. One winter many Gold 
Canon miners were mthout boots. All that were ob- 
tained had been carried across the Sierras by the 
famous "snow-shoe Thompson '' on his Norwegian 
snow-skates. He often took one hundred pounds upon 
each of his journeys between Placerville and Carson, 
which he made in three days one way and in two days 
the other. To add to the miners' discouragements, the 
placers were nearly worked out by 1857. In the years 
between 1850 and 1857, inclusive, the total number 
of miners at work in Gold Canon had varied from 
twenty to two hundred. During this time the average 
of the daily earnings of each miner had diminished 
from more than five dollars to about two dollars. The 
annual yield of the placers, which was only $6,000 in 
1850, rose to $118,400 in 1855, and then sank in two 
years more to but $18,000. 

When the last year of the '50's began. Western 
Utah still remained a comparatively unknown region, 
and its pioneers were losing hope. Trade had departed 
with the close of the placer-gold period of California. 



MORMON AND PIONEER GOLD. 21 

In 1854, three hundred wagons had passed Mormon 
Station in six months; by 1858 hardly one tenth of that 
number went by this route. Most of the scattered 
trading posts — mere tents pitched in the desert to meet 
the pilgrims — disappeared, and their owners were on 
cattle ranches or running saloons in gulches whose 
placer gold was fast becoming exhausted. Nevada 
seemed to be a " played-out country." 



CHAPTEE ly. 

THE PLACEK-MIXIXG PEEIOD. 

Ix the midst of the Carson and Washoe country 
are the TTashoe Mountains, l}^ng east of the Sierra 
Nevada and nearly parallel to that great mountain 
chain. A series of small alpine valleys separate them 
from the Sierras. The highest peak of tliis world- 
famous metalliferous mountain range is 7,827 feet 
above the sea and lies in the midst of a cluster of moun- 
tains of especial interest to the geologist and the miner. 
Gold Canon, -u'ith its little stream, heads far up on the 
south side of the peak and extends to the Carson Eiver. 
Other small streams head upon the north side of the 
peak and flow east through Six-Mile and Seven-^Iile 
Canons, reaching the Carson after many devious turns. 
The early miners, hidden deep in narrow canons, knew 
it as Sun Peak, but after the Comstock discovery it 
was named Mount Davidson. 

Here, in these barren mountains, within a semi- 
circle of less than ten miles radius from the top of 
Mount Davidson, was the scene of some of the most 
t\^ical and stupendous mining developments of which 
the world has any record. But the tale, of which this 
is but the foreshadowing, still belongs for a little time 
to the placer miners of the early ^50's, not to the 
Xevada heroes of '59. 

Pushing up the gulch, the miners founded the little 
village of Johnto^vn, which was situated in the ravine 
22 



^THE PLACER-MINING PERIOD. 23 

four miles above the first trading station at its mouth. 
Between 1851 and 1858 Johntown was considered the 
centre of the mining activities of Western Utah, al- 
though it never contained more than a dozen shanties, 
as most of the miners lived on their claims, in tents, 
or " dug-outs.^^ The old camp at the mouth of the 
canon became known as Chinatown, because by 1856 
the claims in its vicinity were occupied by Chinese, 
and sometimes nearly a hundred of them were at work 
there. The Americans left in the camp made violent 
objections to having their settlement known as China- 
town, and so they called it Mineral Eapids, afterward 
Nevada City; finally it became Dayton, and so remains. 

The mining region had two rather curious news- 
papers soon after 1854. One, the Scorpion, was pub- 
lished at Mormon Station; the other was the Gold 
Canon Switch, published at Johntown. Both were 
written on sheets of foolscap, and were passed from 
hand to hand up the gulch until they reached the most 
distant prospector in the range. 

Johntown, in the days of its glory, was a great place 
for the game known among pioneers as " bucking the 
tiger," or "wrastling with the beast of the jungle." 
"Jacob Job, the leading merchant," says Dan De 
Quille, " used to give the boys all the faro they could 
take care of, and often a good deal more." He dealt 
" out of hand," never using a faro box. Old Billy 
Williams, of Carson Valley, another enterprising gam- 
bler, came into Johntown with the card game of 
"Twenty-one." A few days of free-hand faro and 
Twenty-one during the Christmas holidays generally 
sent all the luckless and reckless Johntowners back to 
toms and rockers, each man " a total financial wreck." 
Johntown in those days had also a Saturday-night ball 
every week at " Dutch Nick's saloon," and the three 



24 THE stohy op the mine. 

white women in town, together with Sarah Winne- 
mucca, the Piute princess, made up the set. 

In 1857 some prospectors found gold in the clay 
of Six-Mile Canon, a deep ravine that heads on the 
north side of Mount Davidson, while Gold Canon is 
on the south side of the same mountain. All the gold 
in both caiions had been washed down from the de- 
composed outcroppings of the great mines, as yet un- 
discovered. From two opposite directions the placer 
miners were now unconsciously approaching the source 
of their gold. Tradition states that a wandering Mexi- 
can who worked a few days in Gold Canon tried to tell 
the miners that among the mountains high above their 
heads was " mucho plata," " mucho bueno plata," but 
his anxiety to have them prospect there for silver mines 
was not understood till several years afterward. 

Looking back on the situation, it certainly seems 
strange that so much ignorance prevailed. In modern 
times every miner who finds placer gold or loose min- 
eral of any sort, known technically as "float," looks 
at once for its sources. But the early prospectors in 
the Mount Davidson canons were typical miners of 
their period; nearly every one in the Western country 
was then equally ignorant. They were so entirely un- 
suspicious of the existence of the great Comstock lode, 
or of any silver-bearing rock, that when the quality of 
the placer gold they obtained deteriorated as they as- 
cended the canons toward Mount Davidson, they could 
not understand the reason. It became lighter in colour 
and less in value, because it was mixed with a percent- 
age of silver, and this percentage increased until the 
bankers in Placerville, California, who bought their 
gold dust, would only pay thirteen dollars an ounce 
where they had formerly paid eighteen dollars. 

. Among the men who were mining in the ravine 



THE PLACER-MINING PERIOD. 25 

when Johntown was in its glory were several who 
especially belong to the narrative. James Fennimore, 
or " Old Virginia," the bibulous, disreputable, and 
amusing teamster of Eeese's expedition of 1851, rep- 
resented about the average of the class to which half 
a dozen familiar Comstock names belong — Peter 
O'Eiley, Patrick McLaughlin, Emanuel Penrod (known 
as "Manny"), Jack Bishop, Joe Winters and loud- 
spoken Henry Thomas Paige Comstock, known as " Old 
Pancake," because he always thought himself too busy 
to make bread. "And even as, with spoon in hand, 
he stirred up his pancake batter," says Dan De Quille, 
" he kept an eye on the top of some distant peak, and 
was lost in speculations." Comstock seems to have been 
a curious combination of shrewdness, vanity, igno- 
rance, and spasmodic energy. Born in Canada early 
in the century, he had trapped and traded for many 
years, beginning in Michigan and ending in New Mex- 
ico, from which region he went to Salt Lake and drove 
a flock of sheep to " Western Utah " in 1856, sold them, 
and began mining in Gold Canon. 



CHAPTEE V. 

THE FIEST QUAKTZ PEOSPECTOES. 

Meain'while, in the closing years of the decade, 
the most thoughtful and intelligent prospectors who 
lived in Washoe, two brothers, named Ethan Allen 
and Hosea Ballon Grosh, the sons of a prominent 
Universalist minister of Pennsylvania, were steadily at 
work searching from canon to caiion for silver, gold, 
and other minerals. K'o one else in all that region was 
so well equipped for the prospector's work, none better 
deserved success, and none were so unfortunate. 
Among the many dramatic chapters of the story of the 
Comstock, nothing surpasses in human interest the 
simple story of these two miners. 

Much that has been written about the Grosh 
brothers and the "first discovery of silver" is mere 
tradition and hearsay; in fact, their story has never 
been given its rightful place in the history of iSTevada. 
I have been fortunate in securing from Dr. Eichard 
Maurice Bucke, of London, Ontario, the loan of a 
manuscript account of the Grosh brothers, which for 
the first time makes a connected narrative possible. 
Dr. Bucke — their faithful friend and chronicler, who 
begins his narrative with: " In the summer of 1857 
Allen and Hosea Grosh, George Brown, and the writer 
were mining in Gold Canon " — appears in other records 
of the time as "the young Canadian prospector." 



THE FIRST QUARTZ PROSPECTORS. 2T 

Leaving the mines after the experiences to be told in 
this chapter, he studied medicine, has been for years 
at the head of an insane asylum in Canada, and is 
known in literature by various essays and by his life 
of Walt Whitman. 

Dr. Bucke describes the Grosh brothers as of me- 
dium height, slight in figure, good-looking, fairly well 
educated, very quick of observation, ready with expedi- 
ents, gifted (especially Allen) with exceptional powers 
of original thought, thoroughly honest and honourable, 
absolutely devoted to each other, industrious, perse- 
vering, chaste, sober, and, above all, " filled with that 
genuine religion of the heart which is the salt of the 
earth." They went to California in the ^^ schooner 
Newton expedition," leaving Philadelphia in February, 
1849, endured more than ordinary hardships, reached 
the placer mines of El Dorado County, found little gold, 
and in the summer of 1853 reached the Western Utah 
camps. 

They worked in Gold Caiion until the autumn of 
1854, making only a bare living, then returned to Cali- 
fornia to prospect for quartz, but still without success. 
They were always working hard, but they never seem 
to have known anything except hard times. They 
just made enough to keep themselves going. Never- 
theless, they never lost courage, and they hoped for 
better days. Writing home from California to their 
father (March, 1856), they give the first hint of Nevada 
silver: 

" Ever since our return from Utah we have been 
trying to get a couple of hundred dollars together for 
the purpose of making a careful examination of a silver 
lead in Gold Canon. . . . Native silver is found in 
Gold Canon; it resembles thin sheet-lead broken very 
fine, and lead the miners suppose it to be. . . . We 



28 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

foujid silver ore at the forks of the Caiion. A large 
quartz vein shows itself in this situation.'^ 

They did not obtain the two hundred dollars, but 
managed to reach Gold Canon with great difficulty in 
September, and, as they soon wrote, '* found two veins 
of silver at the forks of Gold Canon. . . . One of these 
veins is a perfect monster. . . . "We have hopes, almost 
amounting to certainty, of veins crossing the Canon at 
two other points." Then they went back to California 
to try to earn a little more money, but failed completely. 
" We have had very bad luck," writes Allen. 

In June, 1857, writing from Gold Canon, Allen 
Grosh gives more particulars of their discoveries: " We 
struck the vein "without difficulty. . . . We have fol- 
lowed two shoots down the hill, have a third traced 
positively, and feel pretty sure that there is a fourth." 
Their letter contained a diagram which certainly re- 
sembles the south-end Comstock ledges. They con- 
tinue: " We have pounded up some of each variety of 
rock and set it to work by the Mexican process .... 
The rock of the vein looks beautiful, is very soft, and 
will work remarkably easy. ... Its colours are violet- 
blue, indigo-blue, blue-black, and greeenish-black. It 
differs very much from that in the Frank vein — the 
vein we discovered last fall." A few weeks later they 
write that the first assay gave results of $3,500 per ton. 
This amount seemed to them impossible; but every- 
tliing in the above memoranda confirms the idea that 
they had really struck the Comstock lode. Additional 
evidence is afforded by the story that one of their 
friends, !Mrs. Ellis, who was to furnish some capital 
with which to open a mine, was told by them that 
their largest ledge was on what is now Mount David- 
son, and she had a piece of ore containing " gold, sil- 
ver, lead, and antimony," which description would very 



THE FIRST QUARTZ PROSPECTORS. 29 

well apply to Comstock outcroppings. A button of 
silver extracted from ore of one of their claims was 
shown to Dr. Biicke by Allen Grosh in 1857. One 
claim was the " Pioneer/' another the " Old Frank/' 
and a third the " Utah Enterprise." 

Some remarkable references to the discoveries made 
by the Grosh brothers are given by a recently found 
manuscript written by Francis J. Hoover, a pioneer of 
'49, who died in San Francisco some thirty years ago. 
It is called A True History of the Discovery of Silver 
in Washoe, then Utah, now the State of Nevada, and 
is dated September 9, 1863. The story it tells is that in 
July, 1853, Frank Antonio, the " Old Frank " after 
whom the Grosh brothers named one of their mines, 
went from El Dorado County, California, with five 
others, to prospect in Western Utah. He had a horse 
stolen, and while searching for him " on a table-land 
running north and south and broadside to the sunrise " 
he found rich silver ore, which he knew, having worked 
in the silver mines of Brazil. Fie kept the specimen 
after he returned to California, and tried to interest 
men in the subject, but long without success. 

Frank Antonio, the Hoover manuscript proceeds to 
say, then told the Grosh brothers, who had been mining 
in Gold Canon, about his discovery of silver ore in that 
region, and finally helped them to organize the " Frank 
Silver Mining Compan}^" composed of nine members, 
mostly Calif ornians. In 1856 the Grosh brothers found 
what they supposed to be the main ledge, and located 
four hundred feet for each member of the company. 
This, Mr. Hoover believes, was along the axis of the 
Comstock lode. The first claim notice, he says, was 
posted on what is now the Ophir, and another was on 
Gould and Curry ground. 

But the Grosh brothers had no capital and few 



30 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

friends. They were compelled to work on the nearly 
exhausted placers of Gold Canon in order to live from 
day to day. There is a story to the effect that a stock- 
man and trader named Brown, at Gravelly Ford, on 
the Carson, had agreed to supply funds, and that they 
wrote him about their " monster vein." Selling out, 
he was about to join them, when some desperadoes 
murdered him. Meanwhile Hosea crushed his foot 
by a glancing blow of a heavy pick some time in August. 
He had poor food and was worn out with overwork. 
Blood poisoning set in, and on September 2d he died 
in their rude cabin of unhewn stones at the mouth of 
American Flat Eavine. 

Dr. Bucke's manuscript says: "At the time of 
Hosea's accident they were about even with the world, 
were not in debt, and had nothing in hand. When 
Hosea was buried, Allen found himself some sixty dol- 
lars in debt." Allen had determined to cross the Sierras 
to California and interest persons of means in the silver 
claims. Although every day was now precious, as it 
was often dangerous to cross the mountains after Octo- 
ber, he worked in the placers until he paid his debt, 
which took until the middle of ^N'ovember. Dr. Bucke 
also desired to go to California, and the two, loading 
a donkey with books, papers, clothes, blankets, and 
some provisions, started together upon one of the sad- 
dest of journeys. 

Already it was snowing in the Sierras, and their 
donkey stra}ing back at night, lost them four days 
more. It was ISTovember 20tli before they left Washoe 
Valley to take an Indian trail which crossed the eastern 
ridge of the Sierras some nine thousand feet high, 
thence descended three thousand feet to Lake Tahoe, 
went up the main ridge of the Sierras some eleven thou- 
sand feet high, and followed the long western slope into 



THE FIRST QUARTZ PROSPECTORS. 31 

the California mining camps. The total distance from 
the last pioneer cabin of Western Utah to the first cabin 
occupied in winter in California was about a hundred 
miles. 

Snowstorm after snowstorm overwhelmed them, 
preventing return, and finally, in Squaw Valley, near 
the top of the western ridge, a white, relentless wall 
surrounded them on every side. It rained, and grew 
colder, then snowed heavily. They made several futile 
attempts to cross the ridge with the donkey, exhausted 
their provisions, killed the donkey for food, whittled 
out some rude snowshoes, and on November 28th started 
over the soft snow. They climbed for hours, but took 
the wrong trail, and were compelled to return to Squaw 
Valley. The next day they managed to cross the sum- 
mit, and reached a small summer cabin used by cattle 
men known to Dr. Bucke. Here they expected to find 
some flour and bacon, cached several months before, but 
Indians had taken everything. It snowed heavily, and 
they staid in the cabin until their donkey meat was 
nearly gone; then they started down the mountain 
sides. The snowshoes were useless; they kept finding 
and losing the trail, and circled on their own tracks. 
The damp had spoiled their matches and gun. They 
threw away everything they could — even Allen's papers 
— and ran for their lives. At night they burrowed in 
the snow for warmth; their clothes were constantly 
wet. It still snowed, and their strength began to fail. 
On December 3d they made only ten miles. That day 
and the next they wandered about the rugged canons 
along the Middle Fork of the American. On Decem- 
ber 5th they were still weaker. Dr. Bucke writes: 
" This afternoon, when exhausted and despairing, I sat 
down and, weeping, proposed to give up and lie down 
and die where wc were. Allen said, * No, we will keep 



32 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

going as long as we can walk/ . . . and so after a little 
lie persuaded me to make another ell'ort." 

On December 6th they were barely able to crav/1 
along, often on hands and knees. They made about 
three quarters of a mile by noon, when they came upon 
the ditch and log cabins of Last Chance Mining Camp. 
" We were no longer hungry," writes Dr. Bucke, " and 
when food was offered us we found we could not eat. 
Our feet were badly frozen. "VVe could not sleep. We 
got worse and worse. After a few days we became de- 
lirious. On the twelfth day after we reached the camp 
Allen died." 

Thus three young men, friends and fellow-workers, 
who were interested in the development of Nevada 
ledges, had all perished — Brown by violence, Hosea 
Grosh by accident, Allen Grosli from exposure to the 
Sierra winter. Dr. Bucke, crippled and for a time 
broken in health, abandoned the life of a miner and 
returned to Canada. If Allen Grosh had lived a few 
months longer the whole story of the Comstock would 
probably have been different, and its earlier fortunes 
less chaotic. By his death the possession of the great 
Comstock lode was left to others, ignorant and unde- 
serving — the heedless rabble, even then swearing loud 
oaths at the unknown metal that clogged their sluice 
boxes. None of the Californians whom the Grosh 
brothers had interested in their quartz ledges made 
any immediate effort to take possession. In fact, the 
clew was lost. 

The Comstockers themselves have always credited 
the Grosh brothers with having taken at least the first 
steps toward the great discovery, and there is a growing 
belief among those who have studied the subject that 
these two men deserve to be remembered as the true 
pioneers of the district. In 1865, when Schuyler Col- 



THE FIRST QUARTZ PROSPECTORS. 33 

fax visited Virginia City, he presided at the ceremony 
of erecting a commemoration tablet over the grave 
of Hosea Grosh in the little Silver City cemetery. It 
still remains for the commonwealth of Nevada to search 
for the lonely grave of Allen Grosh in the Sierras, and 
then to bring the remains of the brothers together at 
the foot of Monnt Davidson, under a shaft of Comstock 
porphyry on which should be written, " They were the 
First Quartz Prospectors on the Comstock." 

Eeturning to the Grosh cabin of 1857, we find 
another thread of the main story. When the surviving 
brother, Allen, went on that fatal journey to California, 
he cast about for some one to leave in charge of his 
effects. Comstock seemed the most available. It is 
said that a written contract was drawn up; Comstock 
was to have a one-fourth interest in one claim for keep- 
ing it from being jumped in the absence of Grosh, and 
was to live in the little stone cabin. He does not seem 
to have been taken any further into Allen's confidence. 
Both- the brothers were very cautious and secretive; 
but this claim, which was somewhere around the head 
of Gold Canon, was now staked out, and known to 
many, so Allen probably thought it better to give Com- 
stock a share than to have him persuade his associates 
to take possession. It is in perfect accord with what 
we know of these admirably equipped young prospect- 
ors to suppose that both the brothers understood Com- 
stock thoroughly, and that they told him nothing of 
their " monster vein," the Comstock. The usual story 
is that Allen secretly cached his assaying tools and 
memoranda of their discoveries before Comstock was 
brought to the cabin, but Dr. Bucke's narrative shows 
that he threw all his papers away in the Sierras. Long 
after Allen's death, when his heirs and his former asso- 
ciates in California searched for evidence to bear out 



34 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

their claims in court, little could be found. Did Corn- 
stock obtain the clew in some neglected paper in the 
Grosh cabin? Or did he live all winter in the rude 
stone hut where two brave, silent prospectors had 
lived in poverty, fighting slowly and intelligently 
toward one of the greatest fortunes ever lying before 
treasure-seekers — and did he only dream wild dreams 
and go back to his placers the same haphazard " Old 
Pancake " ? Was the rediscovery of the Comstock 
wholly an accident? The reader must judge for him- 
self in the light of Comstock's behaviour during the 
early months of 1859 — the days of Gold Hill and 
Ophir. 






\) :■ 



CHAPTER yi. 

DISCOVERY OP THE COMSTOCK. 

The last yeav of real placer mining in N"evada was 
1858, and long before its close the very air grew full of 
hints of change and growth. Dull of comprehension, 
ignorant of their position upon the verge of an unsur- 
passed mining excitement, the seventy-five or eighty 
men now working in the very tops of the ravines east 
and south of Mount Davidson were nevertheless begin- 
ning to feel the thrill and presence of the spirit of dis- 
covery. For the first time in years there was talk of 
prospecting parties throughout the district to look up 
better claims. 

Johntown was again the centre of activities in the 
winter of 1858-'59, for the weather was unusually cold, 
freezing the water in the gulches, so that the miners 
had a season of enforced idleness. They spent it in 
discussing the situation, which certainly contained 
elements of pathos and sarcasm. Nearly all the John- 
town miners of 1858 were men who had been in the 
region for six or seven years. The only change in 
their occupations had come about as the character of 
the " diggings '' changed. At first they had mined on 
the " bars," then on the ^" flats," then on the sides of 
ravines, ascending toward higher ridges. The ordinary 
auriferous gravel became of darker colour; the soil 
of the hills was heavier and heavier clay, though still 
containing gold. The ground was difficult to liandle — 
4 35 



36 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

full of what they called " sand of iron " and a substance 
they called lead, and a " heavy blue stuff " that carried 
off the quicksilver. Sometimes a miner, after working 
all day long, from sunrise to dark, would go home with 
his back aching from the labour of cleaning his sluice 
box every few minutes from the " accursed base metal " 
that clogged every riffie. Down it was thrown, with 
fierce maledictions, to the bottom of the ravine. 

Our story follows the fortunes of a little group of 
Gold Gallon miners — John Bishop, known as " Big 
French John," Aleck Henderson, Jack Yount, and 
" Old Virginia." One day, about the 20th of Januarj^ 
while they were on the ridge immediately east of the 
canon in which the town of Gold Hill was afterward 
situated, " Old Virginia " pointed across to a small, 
low mound, and said, " Boys, I believe that some good 
diggings are waiting for us there." 

" Let us go and try it," one of them answered. 

^^ Some other time, boys; it's a deep gulch, and late 
in the day." 

The " other time " came on a Saturday, January 
28th, when the four men went to the mound as agreed 
upon. Bishop, who had a shovel, pushed it full of earth 
with his foot. " Old Virginia " found a gopher hole, 
and took a panful from the loose earth brought up from 
a foot or two underneath. They went down to a spring, 
and, washing it out, found gold. They immediately 
staked out four placer claims of fifty feet each, the limit 
allowed by the mining law in that district. " Old Vir- 
ginia," who was held to be the discoverer, took the first 
choice. 

According to nearly every account of the real dis- 
coverers, Comstock only " came in afterward " ; but his 
own narrative claims entire priority and pre-eminence. 
" About the middle of January," he says, " I saw some 



DISCOVERY OP THE COMSTOCK. 37 

queer-looking stuff in a gopher hole. I ran my hand 
in and took out a handful of dirt, and saw silver and 
gold in it. Big John Bishop and Old Virginia were 
with me. When I found it they were sitting on the 
side of the hill a couple of hundred yards from me. I 
took up five claims." 

The day after the discovery all the Johntowners 
came over to the little mound and passed their opinions 
upon the new diggings. The place was so small that 
most of them thought but little of the camp. However, 
it had to be named, of course, and that was always a 
difficult task. The fortunate or grotesque names of 
camps have come by accident; when the miner at- 
tempts deliberately to give a title to the place, his 
imagination generally fails him. It was so in this case. 
Canon-town, Gold-town, and finally Gold Hill were the 
principal suggestions, and the latter was adopted, be- 
cause, according to the naive explanation of Big French 
John, " it was decidedly not Gold Canon." 

In a few weeks the miners on Gold Hill ran into 
^' pay dirt " that was surprisingly rich for the district. 
They actually took out from fifteen to twenty-five 
dollars a day to the man. They were working in the 
detritus of the south end of the Comstock, Nature's 
own concentration of many feet of outcroppings, worn 
down and mixed with wash from the peaks of the 
Washoe Eange. Great mines of the future — Belcher, 
Crown Point, Yellow Jacket, Imperial, Kentuck, Em- 
pire, and others that yielded immense sums a few years 
later — lay hidden in the solid quartz and vein matter 
that began hardly ten feet beneath the surface. 

Old Virginia had taken up a spring in the ravine, 
but all the miners used it without rental. The dirt 
picked out from their respective claims was carried 
down to the water's edge and washed there, old-style 



38 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

rockers being used. Pretty soon they had to pound 
the earth up with a pick handle, it grew so hard as they 
dug deeper into the hill. It contained plenty of the 
same "blue stuS" that had worried the miners in 
Gold Canon, but they were becoming used to it by this 
time, and, besides, the claims were paying better than 
anything else in the mountains. 

The most of Johntown moved there, abandoning 
the shanties in Gold Canon, and Gold Hill soon had a 
store, a saloon, and a cheap restaurant. " Brush huts 
and a tent lodging-house among the sage brush ^' was a 
writer's description. Every one was pleased with the 
change except the Carson Yalley ranchers, whose pack 
mules, loaded with eatables to be sold to the miners, 
had to travel farther and climb much higher. 

Prospecting continued throughout the early months 
of 1859. Those who were not mining upon Gold Hill 
took pick and pan whenever they had a day to spare, 
and tried in vain to make wages in the gulches. Some- 
times they found strange " stuff " that was not gold, 
and very small deposits of the precious metal — 
" pockets " in the hillside that }delded twenty or thirty 
dollars before they were exhausted. This aimless pros- 
pecting went on for several months, every one looking 
for another Gold Hill. 

The real point of interest had shifted to the head 
of Six-Mile Canon. Two Irish miners — Peter O'Eiley 
and Patrick McLaughlin, long among the best known 
of the Johntowners, and old-time comrades — had been 
unfortunate in their recent ventures. Comstock said 
afterward that he was pajdng them wages at this time, 
and that they were worldng on his claims, but in fact 
they had determined to go to the Walker Eiver Moun- 
tains to some new placers of whose richness many 
stories were told, and would have started at once, but 



DISCOVERY OF THE COMSTOCK. 39 

had no money. It was necessary to dig it out of the 
ground, so they agreed to try one more claim in Six- 
Mile Canon, and then leave for Walker River as soon 
as they had a hundred dollars " for a grub stake/^ 

The only piece of unoccupied ground that seemed 
at all promising was on the hillside above all the other 
claims in the canon, near a spring known as " Old Man 
CaldwelFs," where some one had made a short sluice 
box for mining, but had evidently thought the spot 
unprofitable. They used rockers for a fortnight upon 
their claim, carrying the dirt to the spring, but the 
ground was hard, and paid them less than two dollars 
apiece for a long day's work. Remembering the inex- 
plicable location of the Gold Hill diggings on the top 
of a mound, and guided in some degree by the colour 
of the soil, they now started a trench straight up the 
hill, in hard blue clay and yellowish gravel. 

The little spring wasted down the slope, and they 
thought it would be a good plan to dig a pit in the clay 
so as to reservoir a few barrels of water. They began 
this early in June, and here, at a depth of four feet, 
they came upon a deposit of the same sort of dark heavy 
soil that had been found at Gold Hill. It was even 
darker, and sparkled with minute flakes of gold. Run- 
ning swiftly to the mining trench fifty feet distant, 
one of them brought a pan and tested the new find. 
The bottom of the vessel seemed fairly covered with 
precious metal as soon as the gravel, clay, and ^^ black 
stuff" were stirred up and allowed to slide over the 
edge. 

This was the top of the world-famous Ophir, the 
north end of the Comstock. The main masses of the 
mighty fissure vein extended in parallel lines of frag- 
mentary projections from the black mound of the 
Ophir south to the black mound of Gold Hill. At some 



40 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

remote period, ages before, tRe great lode had risen 
hundreds of feet higher; uncounted centuries of 
chemical and physical action had worn and broken it 
until thousands of tons of the hardest of quartz 
was as soft as clay and as fine as sand. This is what 
miners mean by " decomposed quartz " ; it can be 
panned out or washed in a rocker, long tom, or sluice 
box. 

OTiiley and McLaughlin shouted with delight; they 
had found another group of rich placers, alloyed, to be 
sure, with the same base metal that made their gold so 
hard to sell to the bankers, but still as good as the best 
m that district. Xo more notions of "W^alker Eiver; 
they began mining in desperate haste, first sticking 
up a claim notice of fifty feet apiece. By sunset they 
had two or three hundred dollars in hand, and a black 
streak of what all the miners considered " bogus stulf " 
began to extend down the slope. 

Comstock made his appearance just as they were 
finishing the last clean-up for the day. He had been 
looking for his lost mustang, and now came galloping 
down the ridge, with his long legs dangling in the 
sage tops. He came up in a state of great excitement 
and shouted: " You have struck it, boys! '^ 

Jumping from his horse and leaping into the ex- 
cavation, he made a rapid examination of the prospects. 
Then turning to the two warm-hearted and good- 
natured miners, he told them in a voice of genial and 
comidential friendship that unless they managed the 
matter carefully they could never hold the claim. The 
three men sat down on the bank to tallc it over. 

" Look here," said Comstock, " this spring was Old 
Man Caldwell's. You know that; there's his sluice 
box. TTell, Manny Penrod and I bought his claim 
last winter, and we sold a tenth interest to Old Virginia 



DISCOVERY OF THE COMSTOCK. 41 

the other day. You two fellows must let Manny and 
I in on equal shares/^ 

O'Eiley and McLaughlin objected strenuously at 
first, but they were a little afraid of Comstock, and, be- 
sides, fifty feet of a placer claim was more than they 
could work in a season; it did not amount to much, 
after all. So when Comstock added, by way of a 
clincher to the argument, that five persons, of whom 
he was one, had once located one hundred and sixty 
acres upon the bench as a stock range, and he thought 
they were within its boundaries, they gave up like 
lambs and agreed to everything that Comstock pro- 



It is a curious illustration of the free and easy life 
of the time that O^Eiley and McLaughlin did not de- 
mand any proof of Comstock's statement. In reality, 
his claims to the spring had some colour, as he and 
his friends had used it, though no water-right was ever 
recorded. He might possibly have posted a mere notice 
on jthe ^^ stock range," but it could only hold for ten 
days, as he never paid any fees nor occupied the tract. 
Every miner who owned a horse turned him out on the 
unfenced hilJs. 

Now, and most unexpectedly, occurred the first 
" freeze-out " on the Comstock. Hitherto the miners 
had dwelt together in a sort of Arcadia, under their o'^ti 
laws, and were fairly just to each other. Comstock 
introduced a new deal. Having provided for himself 
and Manny Penrod, he went on to Gold Hill before 
the news of the strike reached that place and bouglit 
out Old Yirginia's tenth interest in Caldwell's sprincc 
for the mustang he rode. Subsequent tradition adds 
the picturesque and very probable item of *"' a bottle of 
whisky." 

Penrod's testimony is: '^ We thouglit it was a con- 



42 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

tinuation of the placers that had been worked 
lower down " (at Gold Hill). '^ There was about six 
inches of pay dirt; it increased as we went np the 
hill. On June 12th the pay streak turned and went 
down into a ledge.^^ This fixes June 12th as the date 
of the actual discovery of the Comstock. It caused no 
excitement, however, but was a source of regret, as it 
seemed to show that the diggings would soon be ex- 
hausted. 

Comstock's own account of the whole matter is so 
artistic a piece of braggadocio that it must be quoted 
in order to round the narrative: "I had owned the 
greater part of Gold Hill; had given Sandy Bowers, 
Joe Plato, William Knight, and others their claims 
there. At Ophir, O'Eiley and McLaughlin were work- 
ing for me. I caved the cut in and went after my party 
to form a company. With my party I opened the lead 
and called it Comstock lode. We started to rocking 
with my water. I continued owning the claim, locating 
1,400 feet for myself for the use of my water to the 
company.^^ Comstock goes on to explain how he acted 
as good angel to the camp, and gave rich mines away 
right and left. " I located the Savage claim — showed 
the ground to Old Man Savage. I located the Gould 
and Curry — went into the valley and got old Daddy 
Curry to come down, and put him in possession." 

The little drama was in truth very simple. Com- 
stock, one of the most ignorant and bombastic of men, 
had managed by loud talk and pure impudence to make 
himself the most important personage of the epoch. 
He had never really found anything, but he claimed 
everything in sight. In a few weeks, when miners 
came from all points of Washoe, the most important 
man in the region was thought to be Comstock. 



CHAPTEE yil. 

PLACEK MINING ON" QUARTZ LEDGES. 

Again the real problem presents itself to the dis- 
cerning reader — When will these stnpid people find out 
their own good fortune? E'ot until it is crammed 
down their throats, like a dose of quinine. That is 
already evident to any one who has followed the amus- 
ing career of this Peterkin family of stumbling pros- 
pectors, whose Dunciad of woes regarding troublesome 
silver float all the way up the gulches from Johntown 
has been almost beyond belief. The Grosh brothers, 
even admitting that their " monster vein " was some 
other ledge than the Comstock, would not have waited 
five minutes after the Gold Hill discovery before they 
had filed on the main lode for gold- and silver-bearing 
quartz, and in an hour they would have been sinking 
a shaft. Not so was it with these earliest Comstockers, 
who were mere survivals, mining autochthons of the 
placer-camp age. 

Midsummer of 1859, therefore, became the placer 
period of the Comstock. The surface was rich beyond 
the wildest dreams of wandering Washoe prospectors. 
The steady thud of Johntowner picks, the swish-swash 
of their rockers, was heard at last in the midst of 
dehris from outcroppings of the greatest mineral de- 
posit in America. The miners were literally sleeping 
upon mounds of gold and silver. But even at this late 
moment, when the news of their discoverv was specdino^ 
43 



44 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

over Sierras and Eockies to men who were wise enough 
to read the secret of the " sand of iron '' and the " hard 
blue stuff ^^ at a single glance, O'Eiley, McLaughlin, 
Comstock, Penrod, and the rest were every day taking 
out from five hundred to one thousand dollars in gold to 
each man at work, and were throwing away several times 
as much in silver. Xot one of them was able to rise 
to the occasion. The myriad-sided hints of the past 
had been wasted upon these fools of fortune. 

Some local excitement occurred, of course. Eanch- 
ers came north from Eagle and Carson valleys, east 
from the lands about Washoe Lake, south from the 
Truckee meadows. A few herdsmen and prospectors 
arrived from the desert. Scattered miners in the 
gulches abandoned their claims and hastened to Com- 
stock's diggings. But from all these sources not more 
than a hundred persons entered claims that summer 
along the lode or near to it. Talk of quartz was occa- 
sionally heard, but only of gold quartz; and as the 
deposit became more solid, cheap Mexican arrastras, 
run by mule power, were erected to grind lumps that 
were too hard to be broken with the handle of a pick. 

Com^stock was exuberantly happy for a few weeks. 
His Indians did most of the work, and all he had to 
do was to watch the sluice boxes and take visitors 
around. A party of ladies from Carson Valley were 
upon the claim in July, and, as is the custom in placer 
camps, each lady was offered a " pan of dirt " by Com- 
stock, being expected to wash it out and keep the gold 
as a memento. The pans would have averaged forty 
or fifty dollars apiece, but Old Pancake had taken a 
fancy to one of the number, and so he slipped in a large 
handful of ^^ dust," giving her, as tradition states, more 
than three hundred dollars. Comstock was wildly 
avaricious when mining, and as wildly extravagant 



PLACER MINING ON QUARTZ LEDGES. 45 

with his gold when obtained. He bought whatever 
took his fancy, and gave it away the next minute. His 
only pleasure seemed to be the spending of money, 
and most of his comrades were very much like him in 
this particular. 

Pleasant Hill Camp was the first name given to the 
settlement at Ophir, and some called it " Mount Pleas- 
ant Point." Ophir and Ophir Diggings were also 
names used for a time. By August there were a dozen 
tents, dug-outs, or shanties on the present site of 
Virginia City. The name Winnemucca was then sug- 
gested as preferable to the earlier titles; but one mid- 
night Old Virginia, going home with the boys and a 
bottle of whisky, after an unusually protracted revel, 
fell down when he reached his cabin, broke the bottle, 
and rising to his knees, with the bottle-neck in his 
hand, hiccoughed, " I baptize this ground Virginia 
Town! " A reveller's shout arose, and it was decided 
to return to the saloon and celebrate the new name 
for the rest of the night. It took at once, although 
" town " was soon broadened to " city." Under every 
one of these titles the place was recognised almost 
from its foundation as the most important town in 
Washoe district. Still, there was no hotel, and only 
one small restaurant. Newcomers brought their blank- 
ets and slept in the sage brush on the treeless hill- 
sides. 

Gold Hill, it will be remembered, was located by 
four men, five others coming in later. Only one of 
the nine managed to retain his interest for any length 
of time. Old Virginia gave "Little French John" 
nine feet of his claim. He sold tlie rest of his claim 
of fifty feet at fifty dollars a foot. r>ig French John 
and the rest sold some time after at prices ranging from 
fifty to one hundred dollars a foot. Eodgcrs com- 



46 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

mitted suicide. Old Virginia, while on a spree in 1861, 
was thrown from a horse and killed. All of the origi- 
nal Gold Hillers speculated, spent the money they 
made, and died poor, while fortunes were being taken 
from the ground they had owned. 

The North End discoverers were no more fortu- 
nate. McLaughhn sold for $3,500, a few years later 
was cooking for a gang of men for forty dollars a 
month, died a pauper, and was buried at pubhc ex- 
pense. Penrod sold for $8,500 toward the close of the 
year, and soon spent all his money. shorn, who had 
obtained a sixth interest in the Ophir by building a 
seventy-five-dollar arrastra for the company, sold for 
$7,000, and Winters did no better; both men were 
poor a few years later. O'Eiley hung on longer than 
any one else — even Comstock — and so received $40,000. 
This he spent in stock speculation, and finally died in 
an insane asylum. 

Comstock himself, who belonged to both camps, 
was even more typical of his kind. Two months after 
the ledge was struck he sold all his interests for $11,000. 
He lost every dollar he had, came back to the Comstock, 
found better men everywhere, wandered off on lonely 
prospecting tours in Nevada and the EocMes, and 
finally committed suicide in Montana. His petty 
schemes among his fellows, his simple egotism and 
bombastic lavishness, his brief authority as father of 
the camp, his failure to seize the unparalleled oppor- 
tunity, his return to pick, pan, and prospecting horn, 
his death under the cloud of partial insanity — all these 
are among the dramatic elements of this strange life 
history. 

So had this group of prospectors remained wholly 
unteachable, clinging to their folly, rejoicing to be 
able to sell their claims for comparative pittances. 



PLACER MINING ON QUARTZ LEDGES. 47 

Like the classic fool of Proverbs, Comstock and 
the rest of them had been brayed as in a mortar, but 
their folly remained. These men had in their undis- 
puted possession wealth enough to have made each 
one of them richer than the late Jay Gould. Com- 
stock, had he risen to the opportunity, might soon have 
flashed across the skies of London and Paris the great- 
est speculator of the century, another John Law, run- 
ning printing presses night and day to supply the de- 
mand for Nevada mining stock from claims staked out 
across Flowery Eidge and miles beyond in the desert. 
As it was, each one of them believed he was receiving 
more than his interests were really worth. They had 
never understood the slowly accumulating evidence 
pointing to the Comstock lode as a great storehouse 
of mineral wealth. Others also, who followed them, 
undervalued opportunity, and yielded in time to the 
old law of the survival of the strongest, but none could 
again give so much for so little. 

Thus the placer period comes wholly to an end 
in falsely shrewd bargains. The goddess, so long woo- 
ing these stumbling men, tires at last and turns away 
with laughter in her eyes. Beyond the Sierras, in the 
forests where the body of Allen Grosh lies, there is 
the sound of an advancing army, and thither the god- 
dess looks, choosing new favourites. Already those 
whose day is done are forgotten. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE HUSH ACROSS THE SIEERAS. 

The first news of the mines that was heard west 
of the Sierras made many persons think that the 
district contained only shallow placers. Settlers along 
the eastern slope of the mountains, from Honey Lake 
to Carson Canon, did not hesitate, but poured into the 
new gold region. One of them stood by and saw " the 
famous Mr. Comstock and Old Gentleman Virginia^' 
take out $1,900 in placer gold in one day. 

At ISTevada City, California, in the midst of one 
of the most permanent quartz-mining districts of 
America, the discovery was made that caused the great 
silver rush. A plain Truckee farmer named Harrison 
rode over to the diggings quite early, when Virginia 
City consisted of only two tents. He saw Long John 
Bishop and his partners throwing away masses of 
" blue stuff," and they told him it was vrorse than use- 
less. Picking up a few pieces, he carried them home, 
and afterward to Nevada City. The problem had at 
last reached a set of men who were in the habit of in- 
vestigating what they did not understand. The two 
best assayers in the town tested the fateful " blue stuff " 
and demonstrated that a ton of it was worth $1,595 in 
gold and $4,791 in silver, or a total of $6,356. This 
was the base metal so long thrown away by the guile- 
less and ignorant miners of Western Utah! Tons and 
tons of it were said to be in sight in the " cut " of the 
43 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 43 

Opliir, on the liillside below, and at the Yellow- 
Jacket. 

Harrison, the inquiring rancher, appears to have gone 
back to his wheat fields, but though it was nearly mid- 
night before the value of the rock was known, half the 
people within a radius of five miles had the story before 
breakfast time. Then the miners assembled to talk the 
matter over, and found that two of the best men in 
the district, Judge Walsh and Joe Woodworth, had 
loaded a pack mule, saddled their horses, and started 
long before daybreak for "Virginia City. They could 
not have travelled faster if a score of vigilantes had 
been on their track. This rapid stroke of energy was like 
a match thrown into gunpowder. Hundreds of miners 
left their claims and began to pour over the mountains 
on foot, on horseback, or in wagons, hewing out new 
trails and roadways. 

It should be explained that the Pacific coast had 
long been a region of periodical mining excitements. 
Away back in 1852 it was reported that the ocean was 
w^ashing up gold on the beaches of Humboldt County 
— so much, in fact, that, as Eoss Browne said, it was 
generally believed that any enterprising man could 
take his hat and a wheelbarrow and in half an hour 
gather enough gold to last him for life. A year or 
two later the Kern Eiver rush nearly depopulated the 
northern half of California, and for three hundred 
miles the dry and dust}^ plains were fairly spotted with 
thousands of eager prospectors and speculators; most 
of whom returned, like the Gold Bluffers, ragged and 
penniless. Next came the still more memorable rush 
to Eraser Eiver, British Columbia. Farms were aban- 
doned, crops rotted in the fields. Thirty or forty thou- 
sand Californians poured into English territory, when 
suddenly the gold gave out and the miners returned 



50 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

disconsolate. Every one had said that now, at last, 
there was an end to sneh sudden excitements; it would 
be impossible to impose again upon public credulity 
and upset the commercial progress of staid communi- 
ties. Suddenly the air rang with a new cry, " Washoe! 
Washoe! " and the old Porty-niners were ready for the 
adventure. 

Only a part of the great Washoe rush came in 1859, 
for the season was too far advanced. But as soon as 
reports from those who first crossed the mountains 
came back to the California settlements, men went 
wild with excitement. Judge Walsh, on the 12th of 
August, had managed to buy out nearly the whole 
Comstock group of claims, and Joe Woodworth also 
''got in on the main lode." Men of every type and 
nationality crowded the mountain roads and staked 
out prospects on every hand. 

A correspondent of the Sacramento Union, writing 
from Ophir Diggings, October 22d, reported that the 
total yield of the half-abandoned Gold Canon claims 
for 1859 was $24,000, obtained by forty miners work- 
ing one hundred and twenty days. Fifty Chinese 
miners in the Carson Eiver placers obtained about 
$35,000 the same season. Of course the above does 
not include Comstock returns, excepting a very little 
of the first placer yield there. But, according to figures 
published in the Calif ornian newspapers late in 1859, 
'' Ophir, Central, Mexican, and G-old Hill '^ claims had 
yielded $275,000 before the winter storms prevented 
further work. 

One of the most severe winters ever known in the 
region now followed, five or six feet of snow falling in 
Virginia City. Firewood was very hard to obtain, and 
the tents and huts of the pioneers were extremely un- 
comfortable. Many lived in " dug-outs," which they 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 51 

called "holes in the wall/' All outside commimica- 
tions were cut ol?. Cattle, horses, and animals of every 
Idnd perished from cold and starvation. The Indians 
of Washoe suffered greatly, and many of them perished. 
Flour was worth seventy-five cents a pound, and hardly 
anything eatable was any cheaper. 

Some were glad to get away in the spring of 1860, 
abandoning their claims as not worth such a struggle, 
but the great majority were wild with the passion for 
sudden riches. The small backward eddy was met by 
the vanguard of a still vaster army. Long before the 
snow was sufficiently melted to render the passage of 
the Sierras entirely safe, multitudes were forcing their 
way across. 

The severity of the winter of 1859-'60 had caused 
such high prices at the new camp that every effort was 
made to get goods in early. Before the end of February 
mules laden with supplies were led for miles on blank- 
ets spread over the snow to prevent them from sinking. 
The journey at that season was like crossing the Alps 
in midwinter. Forgotten heroes of the long battle of 
the frontiersman with the wilderness toiled on and 
up, over the ice and snow of the Sierra passes, seven 
and eight thousand feet above the sea. A hundred 
and sixty-two miles was the entire distance from Sacra- 
mento by Placerville, the main route, but forty miles 
of this was comparatively easy. Then the ascent began, 
first in the warmer foothills, but very soon in slush and 
snow. Saddle trains were started for passengers before 
any vehicle could get over the passes, where the snow in 
some places lay fifty or sixty feet deep. Sleighs were 
tried, but the deeper drifts alternated with bare, wind- 
swept rocks. At the earliest possible moment stages 
began to run, some by Truckce, others by Placerville. 

The advance guard of the army of prospectors 
5 



52 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

and speculators reached Placerville to find further 
movement prevented by a snow blockade. Hundreds 
of tons of freight lay on the hillside, though a dollar 
a pound was freely offered to any one who would get 
it over the mountains. More freight was surging night 
and day toward the congested streets of Placerville. 
The steamers from San Francisco to Sacramento were 
"reeling under loads of Washoe freight/^ to quote 
from a correspondent of the San Francisco Bulletin 
in March; their deck loads consisted of sprawling 
figures discussing the \Yashoe Mecca in a dozen differ- 
ent tongues. Merchants closed their stores; clerks 
left their desks and teachers their schools; sailors 
slipped overboard and swam ashore to join the silver 
seekers; mechanics threw down their tools, and farmers 
abandoned their fertile ranches in the broad Cali- 
fornia valleys. Bars of white bullion, the first silver 
from Washoe, were piled in bank windows, or followed 
by admiring crowds through the streets, arousing and 
increasing public interest. 

One shrewd trader named Moore came to the front. 
Having a few dollars to invest, he left San Francisco 
March 9th with two hundred pairs of blankets costing 
two dollars a pair, twenty dozen tin plates costing 
twenty-two cents a dozen, and a large assortment of 
liquors. He managed in some way to obtain pack 
mules, so that he reached Virginia City on the last day 
of March and sold two hundred dollars' worth of drinks 
before nightfall. Forty men paid him a dollar apiece 
per night for the use of blankets and space enough in 
his tent to sleep in. Moore refused eight thousand dol- 
lars for his goods, which had cost him less than one fifth 
as much. The next trader to cross the mountains re- 
tailed some shovels for nine dollars apiece. 

A letter written April 5, 1860, to the Mountain 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 53 

Democrat, of Placerville, describes most vividly the 
condition of things as they appeared to one of the first 
arrivals of the season who had fought his way over early 
in March, even before the arrival of the Moore party. 
" There are few houses in Carson Valley/' the pros- 
pector writes. ^^I have seen only about one acre of 
ploughed land.'' He describes the " "Washoe zephyrs " 
that blew day and night from the snow peaks, and adds 
that there was a foot of snow on the ground and a snow- 
storm in progress. At the time of writing, lumber 
" was selling for four hundred dollars per thousand." 
Eight or ten small buildings were being put up. Can- 
vas, boulders, and dried hides were used to save lumber. 
The business of the town appeared to be " eating, 
sleeping, drinking, and gambling." Wages were five 
dollars a day, but meals and shelter cost four dollars. 
Though many men were said to be millionaires, it was 
merely by reason of estimates of the value of their 
claims. 

This was probably a very truthful statement of 
the condition of affairs in the spring of 1860, but wildly 
exaggerated statements had gone abroad, as in all min- 
ing excitements, in which most persons appear to en- 
tirely lose the power of distinguishing truth from 
falsehood. It was commonly believed in San Fran- 
cisco that many and large arrastras and quartz mills 
were turning out tons of bullion, when in fact all that 
the miners could do in that line in the fall of 1859 was 
to build a few small mule-power and two water-power 
arrastras on the Carson River that pulverized two or 
three tons of rock a day. The loose, decomposed sur- 
face rock was exhausted. 

This was the time when the old crowd rejoiced 
audibly that they had sold out before the new diggings 
were exhausted. Alvah Gould, who sold his half in- 



64: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

terest in the "Gould and Curry" for four hundred 
and fifty dollars, and twenty years later was keeping 
a peanut stand at Eeno, went galloping down Gold 
Caiion immediately after the sale, shouting, " I've got 
away with the Calif ornians! " The whole country was 
crossed by such a network of quartz ledges that very 
few persons looked upon the Comstock group of claims 
as any more valuable than hundreds of others. 

The picturesque features of this great affair, the 
famous rush of 1860, have never been more pleasantly 
illustrated than by a series of papers entitled " A Peep 
at "Washoe," which first appeared in Harper's Magazine. 
AYritten by that genial and accomplished Californian, 
the late J. Eoss Browne, they abound in unfaihng 
humour and clear-cut cormuon sense. N'o writer of the 
time better knew how to use his material, and he had 
the spirit of an almost ideal newspaper reporter. He 
went to Washoe among the earlier pilgrims, " roughed 
it "in a truly refreshing manner, and reproduced with 
pen and pencil exactly the essential elements of the 
scene. 

Eoss Browne, as every one called him, reached 
Placerville by stage from Sacramento with " two pair 
of blankets, one extra shirt, a plug of tobacco, a note 
book, and a paint box.'^ The roads beyond Placerville 
were so bad that the stages had just been taken off. 
The town was therefore full of pilgrims anxious to 
cross the mountains, and " practising for Washoe " in 
the saloons and gambling places. Every sign bore 
"Washoe" in large letters. Pack trains were start- 
ing daily for the mines. The livery stables had their 
horses and m.ules engaged a week in advance. The 
town was full to overflowing. Men who could not get 
beds slept on the floor. There was nothing but Washoe 
to be thought of or heard of; Smith " had made ten 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 55 

thousand dollars there at a single trade " ; Jones 
^^ had found a twenty-thousand-dollar mine " the day 
he arrived; and Eobinson's canvas hotel was " worth 
forty thousand to him." Browne revelled a while in all 
this tumult; then, finding it impossible to obtain any- 
thing to ride, he joined a party of four who were start- 
ing on foot. They filed along the ravine that formed 
the main street of Placerville, with their blankets 
and provisions strapped on their backs; the crowd 
shouted " Go it, Washoe! " and they departed up the 
grade toward " Strawberry Flat." 

It was April, and the track was furrowed with dis- 
aster. Broken wagon-tongues protruded from the mud. 
^' Loads of dry goods and whisky barrels lay wallowing 
in the general wreck of matter." Along the worst 
parts of the canons whole trains of pack animals 
" struggled frantically to make the transit from one 
dry spot to another," or rolled headlong to the bottom 
of the gulch. The cries and maledictions of the Mexi- 
can mqueros were terrific. Browne makes a faint at- 
tempt to describe it as follows: " Carambo! Caraja! 
Sacramento ! Santa Maria ! Diavolo ! " 

JSTightfall overtook the five wayfarers at "Dirty 
Mike^s," a shanty with a bar and a public bedroom, 
where they spread their blankets. The furniture con- 
sisted of a piece of looking-glass on the window frame, 
and the public comb hanging by a string from the 
doorpost. Supper consisted of cofi^ee, beans, and pota- 
toes. The plates, like the landlord, had seldom seen 
water. 

As the travellers proceeded on their way the next 
morning they were more and more impressed by the 
unique features of the great rush of which they formed 
a part. " Taverns of dry-goods boxes and old potato 
sacks," board-and-lodging signs over tents scarce ten 



56 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

feet square, saloons where the whisky barrel set in the 
shade of a pine tree formed the bar — such were com- 
mon scenes along the road. They were never out of 
sight of pilgrims — Irishmen with wheelbarrows; 
American, French, and German miners with tools and 
heavy packs; Mexicans with burros; gamblers and 
confidence men on valuable thoroughbreds; Missouri- 
ans struggling through the mud with their families 
and household goods in lumber wagons; drovers 
with hogs and cattle; organ grinders, Jew peddlers, 
" professors '' with divining rods and electric " silver 
detectors ^^ ; women, even, dressed in men's cloth- 
ing and usually under some gambler's protection. One 
saw youth and strength, illness and old age, cripples 
and hunchbacks — " all stark mad for silver." Weather- 
beaten, footsore, a counter-current of defeated, heart- 
broken men who had already seen too much of Washoe 
went slowly past, but none of the silver hunters paused. 
A few among the returning crowd looked prosperous, 
and tried to sell shares of stock in various Washoe 
mines to the newcomers. One of them was positively 
happy. He had taken a grindstone to the Comstock 
the previous autumn and made thirty dollars a day, 
as long as the stone lasted, grinding tools. ISTow it had 
worn to the middle, and he was on his way to Placer- 
ville to buy another. 

Before dark three of the party had gone ahead of 
Mr. Browne, and one lagged in the rear nearly ex- 
hausted. Poor Browne pushed on to Strawberry Flat, 
about forty-five miles from Placerville, with a solution 
of paints and tobacco running down his legs as he 
walked through a driving rain. The famous " Straw- 
berry Hotel " was a large log house, with every room 
and shed crammed full of treasure seekers. A door 
opened, the fortunate ones hurled themselves into 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 57 

the dining room, filled it, ate ravenously, and were 
driven out like cattle to give place to an equally hungry 
horde. Eight or ten times this process was repeated, 
and by the time Mr. Browne had taken his turn in this 
melee the " general bedroom " was filled by some three 
hundred tired wayfarers. Forty or fifty remaining 
pilgrims occupied a room about eighteen feet square. 
In the morning Mr. Browne found that his stockings 
had been stolen, a very serious loss when one was about 
to climb the Sierras. 

The third day was wasted in a futile attempt to 
reach Lake Valley, and the fourth day's experience 
was even harder than its predecessors. The poor 
pedestrian, carrying thirty pounds or so, slid, slipped, 
rolled, and climbed along the winding trail, which 
" was perfectly honeycombed with holes." Lake Val- 
ley station was reached (Lake Tahoe) through the 
process of sliding down sections of the grade. Accom- 
modations here were so poor that Browne decided to 
push on to Hope Valley, four miles distant. The weary 
traveller found the deepest and most adhesive of moist 
clay, but overtook three more pilgrims, and they tried 
to find shelter in the cabin of '^ Diogenes," as they 
named the only settler in the valley, a rough customer 
who sat on a pile of fox skins just inside his door hold- 
ing a savage bulldog. Diogenes wanted no company, 
would sell nothing, and did not care if any number 
of Washoe tramps died on his doorsteps. The dis- 
couraged quartette went on to Woodford's, six miles 
farther, in the face of blinding sleet and a terrific wind. 
This station, a log cabin, was on the Utah line, and, 
as everywhere else, several hundred people were try- 
ing to get a little food and sleep. 

The fifth day brought the traveller into the desolate 
sands of Carson Valley, where his feet were so blistered 



68 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

that he made only fifteen miles by snnset. Finally he 
felt unable to take another step, when he perceived 
a hot spring close by, toward which he crept. Finding 
the water saline, he bathed his feet, and was soon able 
to resume his journey. 

The sixth day our hero proceeded by slow degrees 
to Carson City, and took the stage a few days later to 
the mines, eighteen miles distant. 

A few weeks later, broken down by overwork and 
exposure and poisoned by bad water, he started back 
across the mountains. Another snowstorm had blocked 
up all the trails, and he was compelled to walk most of 
the way. "A perfect torrent of adventurers" was 
pouring over, forming an almost unbroken line " from 
Placerville to Carson City." He thought that almost 
the whole State of California was on the move to storm 
the Washoe mines. In vain he expostulated with pros- 
pectors, and said that though there were already eight 
or ten thousand people in Virginia City, not one man 
in fifty had either mines or work. Every one laughed 
and pushed ahead, determined to see the elephant 
for himself. 

I have told Eoss Browne's experiences in my own 
way and with considerable detail, because they appear 
to me typical, though much less severe than those 
which fell to the lot of many of the passionate pilgrims 
who were so wild to reach Washoe. The judicious 
reader will be able to infer that the settlement of an 
isolated mining district sometimes involves desperately 
hard work and reckless expenditure of energy. The 
fact is, no one who has not seen it is able to fully con- 
ceive of the nature of the struggle that goes on cease- 
lessly, remorselessly, in such epochs as the one under 
consideration. This very summer the rush to Alaska 
left hundreds of penniless wretches, who were totally 



THE RUSH ACROSS THE SIERRAS. 59 

ignorant of pioneering work, in starving groups along 
the sea-coast, and they were gathered np by various 
relief expeditions. 

In the midst of the excitement, while Virginia 
City was growing like a mushroom, the news of an In- 
dian massacre was brought to the camp. The story 
was that the Piutes had attacked a stage station twenty 
miles away, had killed the men who kept it, and had 
burned the cabins. It was really some young men of 
the Bannock tribe who, aroused by terrible outrages, 
had killed the guilty men; but a company of one hun- 
dred and five volunteers from the mining camps started 
hastily for the main Piute settlement at Pyramid Lake 
to " teach the scoundrels a lesson." In the battle which 
followed, the whites suffered one of the most complete 
defeats on record. More than half were killed, and 
the scattered fugitives fled back to the towns, saying 
that the Piutes were coming with five thousand war- 
riors. The excitement in Virginia City was tremen- 
dous. Martial law was declared. A rude fort was built 
for the women and children. Water pipes were melted 
into bullets. Watchmen were placed on the hilltops. 
A cry for help was sent across the mountains, and the 
California militia and regulars soon marched against 
the Indians, who were defeated and driven into the 
desert. It is the opinion of most students of the aft'air 
that the trouble was entirely unnecessar}^, but from a 
purely literary point of view it seems to belong exactly 
where it happened — in the midst of the great '' Washoe 
rush." 

Twenty thousand people went to Washoe in a few 
months, and half of them remained there. Other 
thousands followed and scattered out to new camps, 
until the movement inaugurated by Judge Walsh when 
lie saddled his mule at midnight and slipped out of 



60 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Grass Valley, bound for the new silver camp, became 
the definite settlement of a new State. Among the 
Californians who came early were James G. Fair and 
John W. Mackay, unnoted in the throng. There were 
to be many successive dynasties of " kings of the Corn- 
stock " before the names of either of them should be 
heard abroad. 

Through 1861 and 1862 the rapid transfer of men 
and money to Xevada continued, but splendid moun- 
tain highways were constructed by that time, and the 
story of the Comstock was presenting new elements 
of surprise. The real romance and heroism of the 
episode belongs, as in California, to the first two seasons 
after the rush began. The years 1859 and 1860 in 
JsTevada history correspond to the years 1849 and 1850 
in California history. Both periods alike witnessed 
a marvellous movement into the wilderness — one for 
gold, the other for silver. The social and financial 
relations of the two communities — one west of the 
Sierras, the other east — ^have been very close at all 
times, but the people of Nevada soon developed char- 
acteristics of their own. A Californian, after dwelhng 
a decade or two in the sage brush and desert, became 
a Nevadan, much as the Virginian of the last century 
who crossed the Alleghanies into the land beyond 
became, in the course of a generation, a Kentuckian. 



CHAPTER IX. 

OLD TIMES IN VIEGIN^IA CITY. 

Ijt a new mining camp all things start at once into 
feverish activity. Mines must be opened, mills built, 
roads and telegraph lines constructed, towns created 
and supplied. Prospectors are at work; speculators 
are buying and selling. New industries of every con- 
ceivable description are springing into existence. 
Nothing is considered done for " good and all.^' With- 
in a month after a building is roofed over it may be torn 
down so that a larger one can take its place. All these 
tilings are simultaneous to a degree that no narrative 
can hope to rival. Though scattered into chapters 
for the sake of convenience, it must be remembered 
that the story of the first busy year or so in the Com- 
stock towns is in reality but one great event — one min- 
gled picture of pioneers, prospectors, speculators, town 
builders, underground miners, silhouetted against 
Mount Davidson. 

When the " surface diggings " began to pay in the 
spring of 1859 the first effort of the miners, as in 
nearly every case on record, was to organize in some 
rude, simple manner for the better protection of life 
and property. In a historical sense, this was a mingling 
of the two currents of political development — the un- 
satisfied desire of the settlers of Western Utah for a 
separate territorial government, and the transplanted 
system of camp ^' rules, usages, and customs " that had 
61 



62 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

been created a decade before in California. A few 
ranchers in Honey Lake Valley bad already organized 
the *'' Territory of Xataqua/^ which finally led to the 
" Sage Brush Eebellion " of 1862. A larger group of 
ranchers in Carson and Eagle Valleys were taking steps 
for the formation of a provisional goyernment for the 
proposed " Territory of Nevada." Meanwhile the men 
of the new camps were not only sending delegates to 
the ranchers' convention, but were adopting local regu- 
lations. 

On June 11th, at Gold Hill, a miners' meeting 
made the following rules: That no Chinaman should 
ever hold a claim in the district; that all "banking 
games " should be prohibited and professional gam- 
blers banished; that theft or robbery is to be punished 
by stripes or banishment, as the jury may determine; 
that the penalties for assault and battery or "wilful 
wounding " should be fixed in the same manner; and, 
lastly, that murderers should be hung. Gold Hill had 
had one homicide in April, when the first house was 
being built, two of the miners having quarrelled in 
a game of cards, and the survivor was on trial at Car- 
son City at the time of this miners' meeting. The 
affair caused the adoption of a mild regulation against 
'^ exhibiting deadly weapons," To prohibit carrying 
them was evidently a refinement of law entirely beyond 
the pioneers. 

Nearly all the miners did their own cooking, but 
as slapjacks, beans, bacon, and coffee constituted the 
usual programme, their task was not very difficult. 
Hotels and restaurants, such as they were, charged too 
much, and so the newcomers secured some kind of 
shelter and the regulation coffeepot and frying pan 
as soon as possible. Blankets were of primary impor- 
tance. Picturesque costumes and a general air of being 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. 63 

engaged in a summer outing have existed only in the 
minds of romantic writers and artists of mining camps. 
Coarse, cheap clothing, dirt and rags, are really the 
salient features. The Comstock miners were com- 
pelled to do their own mending and patching as long 
as flour sacks lasted, and as leather belts were generally 
worn, buttons were never of much importance. 

Eor some months the only way to carry goods to 
Virginia City was on mule-back, and the few boards 
in the camp were taken there in this manner from 
Washoe and Genoa sawmills. Firewood was scarce 
and costly. The nut-pine trees were soon cut down; 
Indians grubbed up the roots and sold them to the 
miners. Sage brush was burned a good deal, but still 
many people were not able to afford the luxury of a 
fire except for cooking. Tunnels, run into the hills 
and widened into one or two rooms, became very popu- 
lar for winter residences. Some miners cooked in a 
brush hut outside; others cut a shaft for a stovepipe, 
and the hillside sometimes smoked as if a dozen small 
volcanoes were in active operation. One large cave ac- 
commodated twelve or fifteen men. A Scotchman near 
Silver City made quite an underground dwelling in a 
hill of rock. He was widely known as the " Nevada 
Hermit," and passed most of his time reading in a 
library of several hundred volumes, which occupied 
one of the rock-hewn chambers. Sunday afternoons 
he used to receive visitors and read sermons to them. 

Virginia City, however much it needed sermons, 
got none in those days. The shapeless town, crossed 
at various angles by three straggling lanes, had no 
social life except in the saloons and gambling houses. 
Cheerful, well-lighted, full of excitement, these were 
the real homes of the miners. Gold and silver were 
stacked up on the monte tables; dice rattled and cards 



64: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

were shuffled all day and all night. The ragged, greas}^ 
dirt-covered multitude filled the saloons with loud 
talk and laughter, except when a pistol-shot rang out 
sharply and the crowd swayed into the street. L}Tnan 
Jones's canvas hotel, eighteen feet wide and forty feet 
long, was one of the first of these saloons. The " bar " 
consisted of an old sluice box and the bar fixtures were 
a pitcher and a dozen tin cups. Another bar was made 
of the side of a wagon box, carried up the gulch on 
mule-back. 

Winter weather in Virginia City, or rather the 
extent and variety of it, considerably astonished the 
newcomers of '59, and was even a surprise to those old- 
timers who had been living in the more sheltered ra- 
vines. Some kinds of the weather were much worse 
than other Hnds, but all were execrable. One writer 
remarked that "Washoe has no climate of its own." 
All it has " is blown over the Sierras from California 
and comes in fragments.'' Several avalanches oc- 
curred after thaws in the Tvinter. Some miners were 
dug out with difiiculty, and one or two persons lost 
their lives. 

'None of these things were so terrif}dng to the 
pioneers as the gales, or " Washoe zeph}TS " which 
plunge furiously downward from the crests of the snow 
peaks and sweep in wild eddies and whirlwinds of ter- 
rific force about Mount Davidson. A man's hat is 
sometimes carried from his head, lifted a hundred feet 
vertically, and then dropped, a twisted mass, at his 
feet. Such a \\ind rips boards, shingles, and sheets 
of tin from buildings, tumbles stovepipes and chimney 
pots down the gulches, and fills the air with flying 
gravel. When the miners founded Virginia City they 
knew little or nothing about the zephjTs, and nearly 
every shanty, tent, and hut was blown out of sight after 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. 65 

a few gales. Two of the first churches built were 
blown flat. Tradition relates that during those early 
gales the air was filled with rags, empty cans, bottles, 
crowbars, pickaxes, cooking stoves, cats, and Indian 
babies. One veracious chronicler says that a donkey 
was once caught up from where he was grazing on the 
side of Mount Davidson and blown eastward over Vir- 
ginia City at the height of six hundred feet above 
the town, finally landing at Sugar Loaf Mountain, 
several miles away. The eyewitnesses aver that as the 
poor beast was hurried over his master's cabin "his 
neck was stretched out to its greatest length, and he 
was shrieking in the most despairing and heartrending 
tones ever heard from any living creature.^' 

In the spring of 1860, when excitement was fairly 
boiling over, a visitor wrote the following terse de- 
scription of the " wondrous city of Virginia," and noth- 
ing could better serve to sum up its appearance: 
" Frame shanties pitched together as if by accident; 
tents of canvas, of blankets, of brush, of potato sacks, 
and old shirts, with empty whisky barrels for chim- 
neys; smoking hovels of mud and stone; coyote holes 
in the hillsides forcibly seized by men; pits and shanties 
with smoke issuing from every crevice; piles of goods 
and rubbish on craggy points, in the hollows, on the 
rocks, in the mud, on the snow — everywhere — scat- 
tered broadcast in pell-mell confusion, as if the clouds 
had suddenly burst overhead and rained down the dregs 
of all the flimsy, rickety, filthy little hovels and rubbish 
of merchandise that had ever undergone the process of 
evaporation from the earth since the days of Noah. 
The intervals of space, which may or may not have 
been streets, were dotted over with human beings of 
such sort, variety, and numbers that the famous ant- 
hills of Africa were as nothing in comparison. To 



66 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

say that they were rough, muddy, unkempt, and un- 
washed would be but faintly expressive of their actual 
appearance; they seemed to have caught the diaboUcal 
tint and grime of the whole place." 

Few mining camps have been so utterly neglected 
by the civil authorities as was Washoe. The people 
kept appeahng to Congress to set them apart in a new 
territor}^ or Join them to California. Lawbreakers 
soon drifted in, and the miners' honest efforts to pre- 
serve law and order became of little value in the wild 
scramble. Parasites and desperadoes, the classes that 
curse every prosperous camp, were often among the 
first that arrived. The miners' courts, as a rule, paid 
more attention to offences against property than to 
those against life. Two of the early thieves were tried 
under a pine tree; each had an ear cut off, and the men 
were driven out of the district. But there was no law 
for the bullies, the " Big Cliief s " as they were called, 
who terrorized the busy town. As Mr. Eliot Lord says 
in his graphic book, Comstock Mines and Miners: 
" They lolled on gambling tables and the bars of sa- 
loons, and swaggered about the city at all hours of the 
day and night." 

Every one has heard of the " Tombstone Terror " 
and the " Bad Man from Bodie." The type has grad- 
ually become semi-humorous; an alliterative Terror is 
robbed of half his dreadfulness, and becomes a cheap, 
theatrical, amusing villain. Not so in the old Com- 
stock days of "Big Chiefs," the most of whom were 
plain and prosaic scoundrels too long unhung. One, 
Sam Brown — heavy- voiced, burly, insolent — had killed 
thirteen men in Texas and California before he reached 
Washoe. He kept a station on the Humboldt for a time, 
and once when a traveller desired something to eat. 
Brown pointed to a piece of bacon. The traveller having 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. 67 

no knife, asked for one. Brown pnlled out an immense 
bowie, then thrust it forward with the remark that he 
had "ah'eady killed five men with that knife/' and 
the startled visitor fled in haste. 

Brown on one occasion in Virginia City took offence 
at some remark made by a poor half-witted fellow. 
Without a word he seized his prey and slashed him to 
pieces with the terrible bowie. Then he lay down on the 
billiard table and went to sleep while the remains of the 
victim were being gathered up from the floor. This 
incident and several others quite as bad are well au- 
thenticated in the history of the rampant ruflianism 
and crime of the period. Sam Brown's long list of 
murders came to a sudden end v.^hen a plucky rancher 
whom he had threatened to kill on sight filled him full 
of buckshot. 

A few "gentlemanly cutthroats" of rather more 
prepossessing appearance were occasionally found — men 
like Cherokee Bob, of Oregon and Idaho, the undoubted 
original of Bret Harte's Jack Hamlin. One of these, 
" El Dorado Johnny," desiring to shoot a man, bought 
a new suit of clothes, got shaved, had his hair curled 
and his boots polished, saying that he might be " used 
up " and desired to " look nice if he was killed," which 
was exactly what occurred. 

As Virginia City, Gold Hill, Silver City, and other 
towns grew in size and v,^calth, thieves, rowdies, and 
footpads appeared to increase in numbers faster than 
the respectable, hard-v.^orking portion of the communi- 
ty. After a while robberies were of almost daily occur- 
rence. A good many murders are supposed to have 
been committed during the reign of this lawlessness 
and when the country was full of strangers. Still, there 
never was anything like the amount and degree of out- 
lawry in [Nevada that there was at a later period in Mon- 
6 



68 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

tana, where the evil characters of the whole Pacific 
coast gathered, and went down at last before the stern 
justice of the vigilantes of the Rockies. 

Before the close of I860, as already sufficiently in- 
dicated, Virginia City had all the vices of large mining 
camps. AYomen of nameless reputations paraded the 
streets in gay attire and jewellery. The Sacramento 
Union sent a correspondent to the mines in September, 
who drew especial attention to the cosmopolitan char- 
acter of the place — Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, 
Mexicans; each class was so well represented that all 
had favourite resorts. The first theatre was opened 
September 29th by a travelling company from Salt 
Lake that played Toodles and Swiss Swains and won a 
mighty reward in hard cash. Wandering barn-stormers 
were probably never more surprised at their reception. 

Let us turn to another side of the picture. Heroes 
and lovers of humanity were in the camp, toiling to 
organize schools and churches and to create a civilized 
social life. All the leading religious denominations 
were soon represented, and some had small churches 
within a year or two. Noble Father Manogue, himself 
a miner in his youth and a man of endless pluck and 
zeal, did a marvellous work among the rough characters 
of the frontier. A Methodist, Eev. Jesse L. Bennett, 
preached the first sermon ever heard on the Comstock. 
It was delivered on the corner of C Street, and when 
the hat was passed after the services it came back 
^^ nearly filled with gold and silver." 

Pioneer Comstock reminiscences are crowded with 
Piute stories. The Indians were good-natured, indus- 
trious, and seldom difficult to manage. Old Chief 
Winnemucca was an able diplomat, and many of his 
braves were fine hunters and guides. A great deal 
of the rough work of the period in mining and lumber- 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. 69 

ing was done by tlie Indians. In Wright's Big Bonanza 
the following conversation occurs with an old Pinte: 

" When me first come here, no house here; all sage 
brush. Me work here, first time me come, for Ole Bir- 
giney, down in Six-Mile Canyum." 

"At mining? '' 

" Yes, minin'. Me heap pull rocker. Me that time 
know Comstock, Ole Comstock. You sabe him?'' 

" Yes, I have seen him. He is dead now; got broke 
up in Montana; bad luck all the time; got crazy; shot 
himself in the head with a pistol." 

"Hum! Ole Comstock dead! Well, Ole Com- 
stock owe me fifty-fi' dollar. That money gone now. 
Well, same way Ole Birginey. He owe me forty-fi' 
dollar when he die. He down to Dayton long time ago. 
One day he bully drunk, he get on pony, pony he run, 
drag ole man on the ground and kill him. Me help 
dig one grave, down by Carson Eiver." 

A mining country is always dangerous to walk 
around in, for there are hundreds of abandoned pros- 
pect holes and shafts in the most unsuspected spots, 
perhaps overgrown by weeds and bushes. Many a poor 
fellow looking for a fortune has " mysteriously disap- 
peared," and ten to twenty years later his bones have 
been found in some forgotten pit. Within a year or 
two after its settlement the country around Virginia 
City was fairly honeycombed with worthless shafts that 
served only to trap wild animals, goats, donkeys, horses, 
cows, and occasionally an unlucky miner. It added new 
terrors to the Comstocker's privilege of getting drunk 
and going home " across lots." 

Old Virginia City people tell innumerable stories 
about these abandoned shafts, relics of the great rush. 
In one case a man started to look up his goats, and found 
footprints leading into an old tunnel. He ventured in, 



70 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

and fell into an eighty-loot shaft which had been sunk 
in the tunnel. The bodies of several goats helped to 
break his fall, and after some hours his neighbours 
tracked him to the place and rescued him. The en- 
gineer of a Silver City mill was once found bruised 
and insensible lying in a shaft in Virginia Cit}^, where 
he had remained for three days. There is another story 
about a teamster v/ho unhitched eight yoke of oxen, 
leaving them connected together by the long log-chain 
and let them browse around while he cooked his din- 
ner. Pretty soon he saw them bunch together and dis- 
appear in a three-hundred-foot shaft w^hich had been 
covered with a little brush, hardly enough to hold up a 
good-sized dog. 

Speculation was of course universal. Wliile hun- 
dreds of claims of every description, located immediate- 
ly after the first silver discoveries, were still buried 
under the snow, the ovv^ners were pleased to claim and 
the public to believe that each one of them v/as as valu- 
able as the Opliir. These "wild-cats," as they were 
afterward called, were bought and sold with increasing 
energy for months. The actually incorporated com- 
panies formed during 1859 and 1860 numbered thirty- 
seven, with a capital stock of $30,040,000. The in- 
corporations of 1861 num^bered forty-nine, with a stock 
capital of $31,462,000. 'No one knows hovv^ many thou- 
sands of claims besides these were put on the market in 
those years. Time sifted out the worthless claims and 
incorporations until only a few were left. The first 
incorporation, Ophir, soon increased its capital stock 
to over five million dollars, Gould and Curry came next 
with $2,400,000, and so it weiit. At the time of Eoss 
Browne's visit in 1860 he made an estimate of the com- 
panies who " claimed to hold '' in the Comstock vein. 
There were nineteen, claimxing a total of about twelve 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. ^1 

thousand feet, and Billy ChoUar held the largest slice. 
Prices ranged from two hundred to two thousand dol- 
lars per foot. Only five or six of the names familiar to 
stock boards appear in the list. 

Of " outside claims ^' Mr. Browne reports " about 
forty miles said to be on a direct line with the Corn- 
stock," and to be richer, if possible, than the original 
yein. Even the desert Vt^as " pegged like the sole of a 
boot " with claim stakes. " Indications " being once 
found in a Virginia City cellar, the whole town site 
was torn to pieces and covered with conflicting claims. 

The miners had long before provided, after a fash- 
ion, for a recorder of claims, and had elected an honest 
but illiterate blacksmith of Gold Hill, V. A. House- 
worth by name, whose book of records and memoranda 
is now one of the official treasures of Storey County. 
It was Houseworth's guileless habit to keep pen, ink, 
and the old blank book on a shelf behind the bar of an 
adjacent saloon. When miners came in to register 
their claims they v/ent to the blacksmith shop, and 
the crowd adjourned to the saloon. Snys Dan Do 
Quille, " The ' boys ' v/ere in the habit of taking the 
book from behind the bar whenever they desired to con- 
sult it, and if they thought a location made by them 
was not advantageously bounded they altered the 
course of their lines and fixed the whole thing up in 
accordance with the latest developments." It after- 
ward became evident in the course of many a tedious 
and costly lav/suit that the miners who tore out leaves, 
altered dates, and changed the records as they chose, 
had made endless trouble for themselves and for the 
district. 

Wells and Cargo's Express Company, which has 
helped to develop almost every mining camp on the 
Pacific coast, opened an office in Virginia City in the 



Y2 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

very first days of its existence; but for a time at least 
the owners of Ophir and one or two other claims banked 
their gold dnst with Lyman Jones, who kept it " with- 
out charge and without responsibility " in a dry-goods 
box under his bed, where twenty or thirty thousand 
dollars often reposed until the mine owners were ready 
to pay it out again. 

The problems of early transportation necessarily in- 
cluded mails before the days of stage coaches. Snow- 
shoe Thompson continued to carry letters across the 
mountains every winter. He even carried type in this 
way for the first newspaper in Virginia City. In sum- 
mer time, after 1858, the regular overland stage carried 
mails twice a week along the Carson Yalley. In April, 
1860, the famous Pony Express was established across 
the continent. Its quickest time was 1,780 miles in 
five days and eighteen hours; stories of its lonely sta- 
tions and its fearless riders are among the most attrac- 
tive of frontier traditions. 

That curious and vivid Western phrase, *^ grape- 
vine telegraph," originated in 1859. Colonel Bee con- 
structed a telegraph line between Placerville and Vir- 
ginia City, attaching the wire to the trees; their sway- 
ing stretched it until it lay in loops on the ground, re- 
sembling the trailing California mid grapevines. Fre- 
quent breaks occurred from falling trees and avalanches, 
till the line became almost useless, being sometimes 
beaten into Sacramento by the Pony Express. Cali- 
fornia and [NTevada newspapers took it up, and whenever 
a journalist wished to cast doubts on the freshness of 
his opponent's news he forthwith accused him of run- 
ning a grapevine telegraph. But in the spring of 1861 
the Overland Company pushed into the Sierras and 
successfully connected Virginia City with Sacramento 
by a modern telegraph wire on poles. 



OLD TIMES IN VIRGINIA CITY. 73 

A little later in point of time, but still belonging 
in essence to the pioneer period, was the noted " Rowdy 
Fund." The Territory of Nevada was organized by 
act of Congress, March 2, 1861, and a superintendent 
of schools was then appointed. Pioneer schools sup- 
ported by individuals were already in existence. Vir- 
ginia City contained only two or three children of 
school age at the time, seventeen in 1862, and three 
hundred and sixty the following year. At Carson City 
a characteristic incident occurred. The town boasted 
of a small theatre, and one night two " prominent citi- 
zens,^^ full of whisky and bravado, swaggered down 
the main aisle, drew their revolvers and bowie knives, 
and ordered the curtain to be dropped. They then 
mounted the stage and slashed the curtain to ribbons 
" in the presence of all Carson." The next day they 
voluntarily paid a thousand dollars into the town school 
fund, where it received the name of the " Carson Eowdy 
Fund." The affair, as it proved, was the result of a 
wager made in one of the Carson saloons. 

Before closing this chapter a few statistics of the 
towns of Washoe at the end of 1860, when winter had 
already commenced, will give the reader an idea of what 
had been accomplished by the pioneers. In Virginia 
City the huts of early summer had mostly been re- 
placed by board cabins, for lumber had fallen to $80 
per thousand as soon as a good road was built. Over a 
himdred buildings were in process of construction, be- 
sides an uncounted number of lesser shanties. The 
town contained 38 stores, 25 saloons, 10 livery stables, 
2 quartz mills, 5 lumber yards, 9 restaurants, 8 hotels 
and boarding houses, and 8 law offices, besides bakeries, 
blacksmith shops, etc. The monthly rent of a cigar 
stand was $125, and that of a wooden warehouse twenty 
feet square was $250. 



74 THE STORY 0"^ THE MIXE. 

Prices of supplies were very variable during 1860. 
rioTir;, which was 20 cents a pound in January, was $1 
in April. The newspapers gave the following as cus- 
tomary rates until May or June: Brown sugar, 50 cents 
a pound; rice, 45 cents; butter, $1; tin plates, $9 a 
dozen; liquors, 50 cents a glass. Prices fell rapidly 
during the summer, but rose again with the first snow- 
storm. On October 27th flour was 14 cents per pound, 
barley was 12 cents, and hay was $100 a ton. 

Wages were correspondingly high. Masons re- 
ceived $8 a day; carpenters, $6; tinsmiths, $5; com- 
mon labourers, $4; cooks, $100 a month; waiters, $60. 
Ordinary miners got $5 and mill hands from $4 to $6 a 
day. 

At the close of 1860 the population of Silver City 
near DeviPs Gate was 594; of Gold Hill, 600; and of 
Virginia City, 2,244. The three small settlements in 
the valley — Da}i:on, Genoa, and Carson — had kept 
reasonable pace ^vith the three towns of the Comstock. 
Other settlem^ents were established in the Yf ashoe Val- 
ley and the Truckee basin. The names of new camps 
began to be heard in every direction. 

Ever}n;\diere, after the summer of ISCO, the Cali- 
fornians controlled the politics and business of the 
region. In the constitutional convention of 1863 all 
except four out of the forty-three delegates had come 
to Nevada from California. In the convention of 1864, 
which drew up the constitution under wliich the State 
of Nevada entered the Union, all except four out of 
forty-six members were Calif ornians. Long before this, 
however, the financial control of the Comstock had 
largely passed into the hands of San Francisco capi- 
tahsts. 



CHAPTER X. 

FINDING, TESTI^^G, AND WORKING OEES. 

( Befoee the miner comes the prospector; the ore 
must be discovered before it can be tested, or the pre- 
cious contents extracted. We have been so long follow- 
ing the fortunes of a single camp that we have in a 
measure neglected the hero of many an unsung epic 
of the American frontier. People often vfonder why 
rich mines remain so long undiscovered, and why the 
early prospectors made so many mistakes, overlooked 
so many rich districts. On the contrary, a little reflec- 
tion will convince any one that the exploration accom- 
plished by the comparatively small class of pioneers 
who devote themselves to looking for mines is really 
very creditable. 

AYherever the old quartz prospectors wandered vrith 
their blankets and burros they examined with critical 
gaze every boulder, and tried to trace every scattered 
fragment of " float rock '' back to the ledge from which 
it came. They endured nameless hardships, fought In- 
dians, starved and froze among the snow peaks, perished 
by thirst in the desert, or became old and worn out 
long before their time, despite their sober and outdoor 
lives. With pick and rifle they opened up nearly all 
the great mining districts of Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, 
Idaho, and Montana.'! The true story of their lives 
has never been written, and never can be written; it 
remains a sealed book, in a mysterious language of 



76 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

wliicli only occasional episodes may be haltingly trans- 
lated. The story in its fulness is only known to those 
Avho have spent years as wandering prospectors, the 
Boones and Carsons of the mining class, and snch men 
can not tell it themselves. 

Each prospector develops in the course of time his 
own pet theory of the formation of rocks, and more 
particularly of the genesis of gold and silver. He 
knows certain rocks, usually by terms of his own, and 
all the rocks he doesn't know are grouped under the 
convenient classification of " porphyry.^' An observ- 
ing writer, E. M. Endlick, in the Overland Monthly, 
fifteen years ago, narrated something of the experiences 
of Grizzly Joe and Dutch Billy. They had followed 
up a bit of float and at last found the ledge from which 
it came, high up on the mountain side. It seemed 
rich, and one of them guarded it while the other went 
to the nearest town, several days' journey, to obtain 
an assay — thirty-two ounces of gold and nine of silver 
to the ton. 

They named it the ^^ Little Annie," after a frail, 
fair-haired child of years before, away back in some 
Eastern town. After a few weeks, as they worked on 
the ledge, she (all ore veins are feminine in miner 
phraseology) — she *^^ did not show up well." Pretty soon 
the two walls inclosing the vein of ore came closer and 
closer together; after a few more days there was no 
ore in the bottom of the sloping shaft — the vein had 
'^ pinched out " ; *^ Little Annie was gone." The two 
prospectors contemplated the deceitful "gash vein" 
with a mingled expression of grief and astonishment. 
Then, striking camp, they pushed on toward another 
district. Winter was approaching and " grass was get- 
ting short " with them — ^that is, their funds were run- 
ning low. 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 77 

"Halloo, stranger!^' said Grizzly Joe a few weeks 
later to a dilapidated-looking specimen whose back was 
turned to the district they were bound for and who 
was evidently trying to escape from it with all pos- 
sible speed. "Halloo, I say; been up to the new 
mines ? " 

" You bet! '^ was the laconic but expressive answer, 
while the stranger glanced sorrowfully at the holes 
which constituted the greater portion of his boots, and 
at the cacti and obsidian splinters strewn over the 
desert trail. 

"Let's have your candid opinion of the chances 
there.'' 

" Chances? I never seen none. There may have 
been some, but they're mighty well corraled, and I 
don't think the whole district is worth a blank anyhow, 
Cap'n." 

"You're kinder down on your luck; but never 
mind, stranger, you'll strike it yet if you stick to it. 
Guess we might as well be there as anywhere else." 

The two prospectors resumed their journey with 
dogged resolution. 

Fortune finally smiles upon their efforts. Beyond 
the new district, in a region hitherto but slightly ex- 
plored by prospectors, they find a permanent lode, and 
appropriately name it " Last Chance." Bu3^ers come in, 
for one or two noted mines are in the region, and pretty 
soon they sell out for a few thousand dollars, divide, 
and separate for the winter. " Dutch, old pard, next 
spring we'll take another trip!" is Joe's parting re- 
mark. 

In the last decade, prospecting has more and more 
attracted adventurous men, and in some cases women. 
Several thousand persons are busy, even while these 
lines are being printed, looking for new mines in deserts 



78 THE STORY OF THE MI^IE. 

and mountains. In some districts prospecting can be 
done only in v/inter, in others only in summer, while a 
few favoured regions give explorers a chance through 
the entire year. Most of these men are ''^grub-stakers'' ; 
they get enough to live on — perhaps $15 a month — 
from wealthier miners or from speculators. The courts 
have decided that a grub-staker is entitled to half of 
every mine he discovers, and this interest, now and 
then, gives a man a fortune. Very few m^ines are being 
found in these days by haphazard luck. The success- 
ful prospectors are patient, methodical, indefatigable 
workers, who often spend years in f olloy,dng up indica- 
tions, exploring every ravine and peak in a promis- 
ing district. Every year some grizzled old prospector 
turns up with valuable discoveries, after half a life- 
time of arduous, exacting toil on the frontier, and the 
good news inspires all the other prospectors with re- 
newed happiness. 

The processes of testing gold ores are within the 
comprehension of the most ignorant, but the most 
highly trained intelligence is required in the more 
delicate and difncult tests of the silver assayer. Near- 
ly every quartz miner and prospector in Comstock days 
carried a small magnifying glass with which to examine 
ores. If the rock looked well, a specimen was pounded 
to dust in a common mortar or on a flat stone. The 
prospector then took it in his horn spoon, a flat vessel 
made from half of an ox horn, and washed it with 
great care so as to save every colour of gold. It will 
be seen that all this resembles the simple pick-and-pan 
method of prospecting for placer gold. The quartz 
prospector prefers the horn, because he only pans out 
a few ounces of powdered rock, and the flakes are so 
much finer that a more manageable tool is required 
than in the case of the placer prospector. This process 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. ^9 

is called "horning a prospect/^ or "assaying with a 
spoon." ; 

In early days the only test that prospectors 
knew hov^ to use for silver was with acids. They pul- 
verized the specimens as if for a gold test and v/ashed 
the lighter matter away, leaving all the metallic por- 
tion. This residuum was then put into a flask of an- 
nealed glass, covered with nitric acid, and heated over 
a flame. The contents of the flask were then treated 
with salt, or with muriatic acid, wdien chloride of silver 
was precipitated. Chloride of silver, once obtained, 
was easily reduced to the metallic form by drying it, 
placing it in a hollow cut in a piece of charcoal v/ith a 
little soda, and blovmig the flam^e of a candle against 
it, when it made a button of pure silver. 

The old prospectors soon discovered that there 
were ores that were " obstinate " and refractory under 
the nitric-acid test. When the value of chlorides was 
discovered they dubbed every heavy metallic rock that 
they could not test for themselves a " true silver chlo- 
ride." As the chloride ores have to be smelted in a cruci- 
ble, the nearest assay er v/as called upon, and his returns 
were looked for with great anxiety. Usually the rock 
was not worth working, but sometimes it was a sudden 
bonanza, as was the case with the astonishingly rich 
chlorides of Colorado. In these days the best pros- 
pectors who do not wish to take any one else into their 
confidence have mastered the principles of using the 
crucible. Many a man who goes into the desert with 
his pack mule carries something of an assaying outfit, 
and can test almost any ore. 

Since the Comstock mines contained gold, silver, 
copper, and other minerals, the management of their 
ores presented almost unsurmountable difiiculties to the 
early miners as soon as they reached the ledge and were 



80 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

compelled to abandon their rockers. They naturally 
turned for help to the few 'Mexicans in the region, for 
every Mexican was supposed to have an intuitive knowl- 
edge of silver-mining processes. As long as this con- 
fidence lasted it was a very good thing for the sheep 
herders that strayed over the Sierras from the San 
Joaquin, for every Comstocker wanted to hire them at 
once. 

When the mines were somewhat opened — that is, 
quarried into by the use of shovels, picks, crowbars, 
drills, and blasting powder — there was quartz to be 
worked for its hidden metals. The arrastra was the 
first method adopted. An arrastra is one of the sim- 
plest methods of pulverizing and amalgamating aurif- 
erous quartz. It was invented, or re-invented, centu- 
ries ago by the Mexicans, and consists of a circular 
bed from eight to twenty feet across, paved with stones, 
in which quartz that has been broken into small pieces 
by a sledge hammer is placed and slowly ground to dust 
by the dragging of a large " muller '' or slab of granite 
over the quartz-covered pavement. In the best form of 
the arrastra the paving is very carefully done with hewn 
rock, granite, or greenstone; a boundary wall of granite 
a foot or tv/o in height confines the quartz, and a post 
rises in the centre from a stone or iron socket. Two 
arms project from the post, fastened in a framework 
so as to revolve easily, and one of them projects so far 
over the wall of the arrastra that a mule can be har- 
nessed there. Suspended from the arms are two huge 
mullers, or sometimes four, in which case two mules 
are necessary. Each muller weighs five hundred or a 
thousand pounds, and is suspended so that the forward 
end is an inch above the pavement while the other end 
drags. 

The rule for brealdng the quartz is to make it like 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 81 

good road metal — no piece larger than an inch across. 
About four hundred pounds is then put into an arrastra 
ten or twelve feet in diameter; a thousand pounds into 
the largest size. If the quartz is not very hard it can 
be pulverized in four or five hours. The ore is kept 
wet all the time, and the grinding is continued until 
the mass is like cream. Quicksilver is then put in at 
the rate of an ounce or more to each ounce of gold that 
is supposed to be in the quartz, and the grinding goes 
on for an hour or two longer until the amalgamation 
is considered complete. Quite a stream of water is then 
allowed to run in through a sluice gate, and the grind- 
ing continues half an hour, to let the amalgam settle 
in the bottom. Grinding then stops. Another gate 
is opened, and the stream of water soon washes out 
the fine gray mud to which the rock has been reduced, 
leaving the metal on the bed of the arrastra. 

From arrastras to stamp mills is an easy step for 
Americans. Water claims and mill sites were taken up 
almost as soon as work had fairly begun on the Com- 
stock, and machinery was ordered in California. The 
principle of the stamp mill is very simple. Heavy iron 
stems raised by iron cams and receiving a rotary motion 
as they rise are used to crush the quartz. The mill 
men of ISTevada County, where quartz mining was first 
undertaken on an extensive scale, were in great demand 
on the Comstock. They knew all about the most per- 
fect processes in use in that famous gold-bearing dis- 
trict, and when they went to AYashoe they built mills 
on the same general plans, with such modifications as 
experience suggested, but none of them knew much 
about silver ores. 

The first working of Comstock ore was done at 
San Francisco in the winter of 1859, when forty tons 
of selected rock from Opliir was handled at some profit, 



82 TEE STORY OF THE MINE. 

though costing ahout twenty-four thousand dollars, in- 
cluding transportation and other charges. There 
could be but little thousand-dollar ore, even in Ophir, 
and so it was necessary to build mills in Yv'ashoe. A 
well-written paper by A. D. Hodges, Jr., of San Fran- 
cisco, entitled Amalgamation at the Comstock Lode, 
iN'eyada, which was read before the American Institute 
of Mining Engineers in September, 1890, gives a trust- 
worthy account of early milling operations. Many of 
the prominent mill men and inventors of the period 
were more or less controversial, and waged a dreary 
warfare against their rivals through numberless news- 
paper articles and pamphlets whose interest for modern 
readers has long evaporated. 

Almarin B. Paul, a very able and intelligent mill 
man of Nevada City, began to study the silver sul- 
phurets of the Comstock in the autumn of 1859. He 
treated them with the chemicals of the ];)atio process, 
and, after many experiments, went to the mines, where 
he organized " Washoe Gold and Silver Mining Com- 
pany ]^o. 1'^ Selecting a site for his Pioneer Mill, in 
Gold Canon, near Devil's Gate, he signed contracts 
on June 12, IS GO, to work ore from Gold Hill on and 
after sixty days from that date. Pew men would have 
taken such risks, for the machinery had to be made in 
San Francisco and transported across the Sierras, while 
the needed lumber was still growing in the forests. 
However, Paul worked as one inspired, and on August 
11th, just in time to save his contracts, the steam whistle 
blevf, and the twenty-four stamps of the Pioneer jMill 
began to rise and fall upon Gold Hill ore. Three hours 
later, and not far off, Paul's rivals, Coover and Harris, 
of Amador County, California, set in motion the ma- 
chinery of their nine-stamp mill. 

Without going into more technical details, I may 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 83 

explain that Paul crushed the ore dry in his batteries, 
and then amalgamated it in small Knox pans, each 
of which held about three hundred pounds. Each 
charge was treated with forty pounds of quicksilver, 
a pint of salt, and a few ou.nees of copper sulphate. 
When Paul had fitted steam chambers to the pan bot- 
toms his Washoe process of pan amalgamation was an 
acknowledged triumph, especially with Gold Hill ore, 
which was simpler than that of the North End mines. 
In a few months PauFs company began to build an- 
other and much larger mill of sixty-four stamps, in- 
troducing mechanical improvements. Other mills fol- 
lowed, constructed with more and more skill. The 
ultimate Comstock verdict was in favour of stamps of 
about nine hundred pounds, dropping about a hundred 
times a minute, and crushing wet. Since that time 
the amalgamating pans have been greatly improved. 

When the first mills were completed, the only mines 
that were being worked in a manner that really indi- 
cated the permanent value of the district were the 
Ophir, the California, and the Mexican. As the ore 
was taken out of these and a few other Comstock mines 
it was assorted into grades. The best, which would 
yield one thousand dollars a ton and upward, was sacked 
for shipment to England, except the small amount 
required to keep the arrastras running. The second- 
and third-class ores were piled up for future milling. 
Pock that would not pay fifty dollars a ton was hardly 
considered worth saving. 

Even after pan-amalgamation systems began to 
come into general use some of the early milling men, 
like some of the early miners, learned their business 
by slow degrees. They knew very little about silver 
ores, and so the day of the " ]~)atcnt-medicine-process 
fiend " dawned on the Comstock. Washoe was fairly 
7 



84: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

overrun by eager inventors with chemical compounds 
that they felt certain would capture every particle of 
gold, silver, lead, copper, and other metals and grade 
them into separate piles. Every ragged and penniless 
dead beat in Virginia City buttonholed mine owners 
and mill men with a story of some secret process ^' worth 
millions, sir! " Sulphate of copper, salt, and quick- 
silver, long used by silver miners and mentioned in 
every mining book, were not sufScient. Neglecting 
the good old axiom that thorough grinding and work- 
ing of the ores is the primary principle of successful 
milling, everybody seemed to go rainbow chasing for 
something that would perform impossible chemical 
wonders. A number actually used immense quantities 
of a bitter sage-brush decoction, and were thoroughly 
persuaded of its efficiency until a few of the news- 
papers praised the famous ^'^ sage-brush process '^ to the 
sides. As late as 1862 there was a mill on the Comstock 
that advertised reduction of ores by the ^^ sage-brush 
method." It was argued that Nature had created this 
most bitter and worthless Artemisia for the express 
purpose of getting the metal out of Nevada's silver 
mountains! 

AVhen such absurdities as this were believed by the 
masses it is no wonder that half-crazy schemers with a 
few ponderous phrases at their command could impose 
upon the community with secret processes for which 
they wished large sums of money or royalties. They 
hailed from every part of the world. The English- 
man had " studied silver in Cornwall," the German at 
Ereiberg, the Spaniard in Sonora or Peru, and each 
and all carried the whole trick in a little bottle in his 
vest pocket, ready, for a consideration, to pour a few 
drops into the amalgamation pan. 

The mill men, as I have said, caught the popular 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 85 

desire for some easy and " dead-sure " method, and 
long after the notion of cedar and sage-hrush decoc- 
tions was definitely abandoned many of them were 
still ransacldng the drug stores of California for new 
and unheard-of substances to mix with the pulverized 
rock in the batteries. Alum, saltpetre, borax, potash; 
all the acids obtainable, from muriatic to sulphuric; 
tobacco enough for an Australian " sheep-dip " ; a 
multitude of strange drugs and vile concoctions never 
before known in the mining world, and seldom since — 
such were some of the contents of these witch caldrons. 

Meanwhile the building of new mills went on with 
all haste possible, at great expense and in all sorts of 
places, whether or not there was ore enough in sight 
to keep them busy. No less than seventy-six mills, 
costing in the aggregate six million dollars and carrying 
1,153 stamps, were built and running by the end of 
1861, and twenty more were planned or being built. 
Several Mexican 'patio yards and fifty or more arrastras 
were in existence. All this was within fifteen miles of 
the Comstock. The mills lined Seven-Mile, Six-Mile, 
and Gold Canons, from Virginia City to the Carson 
Kiver; they were scattered along the Carson for ten 
miles or more, and several were even on Washoe Lake. 

It would seem as if the main problems were now 
solved and the success of the districts assured. But, 
notwithstanding the plenitude of energy and capital 
poured out, the chief result for years was loss and bitter 
disappointment. So many mills were built that the ore 
in sight in the mines could not possibly supply half of 
them, and the price of reduction fell to twenty or thirty 
dollars a ton, which did not pay the majority of the 
mill owners with their crude processes and high prices 
of labour. The whole country was so overflowing with 
excitement that every prospector deemed himself a 



86 THE STOPvY OF THE MINE. 

millionaire, whose rich ledges had only to be poured 
into hoppers to run ont bullion. Every one was will- 
ing to accept the wealth of the region on the strength 
of vest-pocket samples of ore. Forgotten mines, like 
the once-popular " Sucker/^ were expected, according 
to their assayers, to pay five hundred dollars to the ton 
— and yielded less than twenty dollars on a working test, 
so that none of the mills of the period could show the 
owners a profit, is'umbers of the mines never yielded 
much besides assessments and litigation. 

Kelly^s First Directory of ISTevada Territory, which 
I find was written for him by the versatile Dr. De 
Groot, and is now an extremely rare volume, contains 
descriptions of all the mills built in the various ISTevada 
districts before the close of 1863. He Hsts some 
eighty-two effective mills. A low estimate would be 
that fifteen hundred tons of ore a day could be worked 
in all these mills — provided that it could be obtained; 
but the mines were not producing more than four hun- 
dred tons daily! The published statistics of the mills 
vary greatly. The Surveyor General's report for 1865 
mentions only eighty. J. Eoss Browne's report, three 
years later, gives 122 mills, with 1,462 stamps. 

Some of the mills of the pioneer period (1860-1863) 
are still spoken of among miners as magnificent ex- 
amples of wild extravagance. The great Ophir Mill 
property contained, besides the mill itself, large shops, 
stables, ofiices, and residences. Up to April, 1863, as 
estimated by Mr. Lord, $340,300 was paid for the re- 
duction of only three thousand tons of ore, for freight, 
and for office expenses. The works had cost $300,000 
additional. " Gould and Curry " built the greatest 
mill folly of the time on an artificial plateau cut out of 
a rocky point two miles east of Yirginia Cit}^ It was 
a highly artistic structure of stone and wood^ ap- 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 87 

preached by steps of stone and broad terraces. A lake 
and fountain, and groups of costly residences, offices, 
and cottages won the visitor's admiration. Yery nearly 
a million dollars was spent here in picturesque pro- 
fusion by the prosperous mine owners, then in the 
full glory of a famous bonanza. But turning to re- 
sults, we find that at the close of the year 1863 this 
prodigal mill had been able to reduce only 4,812 tons 
of ore, at a cost of about fifty dollars a ton. It was 
found necessary to throw out nearly all the machinery 
and reconstruct the mill in 1864 at a cost of nearly 
$600,000. 

As the reader may conclude from the preceding 
paragraphs, none of the pioneer mills — not even the 
costliest and largest — were such mills as a progressive 
miner of the present time would use if he could help 
himself, though they were the best that could be con- 
structed upon lines of California experience. But mil- 
lions of dollars were undoubtedly lost in the first few 
years, chiefly because the tailings, or pulverized rock 
that has passed through all the processes for gathering 
up the metal, were suffered to go into the streams, to 
be washed at last into the Carson sink, or alkaline lake. 
'No one thought of putting in a flume and running the 
waste to some flat, to be kept until cheaper processes 
made it possible to v/ork it at a profit. 

Mexicans are accustomed to saving mine tailings, 
and if any Mexican was out of work he went down into 
Gold Canon and " concentrated tailings " for a living, 
usually by the patio process. Two men who worked 
in the summer of 1860 in this way are said to have taken 
three thousand dollars apiece with them when they 
left the district. Although there was every sort of evi- 
dence that the streams were full of precious metals 
lost from the mills, it was years before the tailings 



88 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

were properly impounded in reservoirs for future work- 
ing. 

The problem of handling tailings severely tried the 
best metallurgical skill of the times. The term " tail- 
ings '^ as here used includes all the ore residues, or 
waste, whether slimes, pan tailings, or concentrates. 
Louis Janin and his brother, leading metallurgists on 
the Comstock, began to experiment with tailings as 
early as 1862, perfected a process, and built separate 
mills, gradually creating an industry which employed 
many men and at times yielded large profits. The 
most successful taiHngs mill was Langtry's famous 
Lyon Mill, at Dayton, at the mouth of Gold Canon. 

One of the heaviest expenses of mill men is for mer- 
cury used in amalgamation. Quicksilver will divide 
into infinitesimal particles, and the smallest particle 
was found to contain gold and silver. How should 
it all be secured? Water that seems as pure as a moun- 
tain spring, because it has passed through flumes and 
settling pits after leaving the mill, is yet found to con- 
tain these particles. Even as the mint authorities find 
it necessary to save all the dust and soot, even on the 
roof, and occasionally melt out the gold, so the mill 
owners in every district find that the profit of the dis- 
trict depends upon a constant attention to details, and 
more particularly upon adopting every possible method 
of securing these elusive particles. As for the quick- 
silver which is so necessary to miners, the Comstock 
ores alone have sometimes required as much as eight 
hundred flasks, or 61,200 pounds a month. A whole 
colony of people in the California Coast Eange, at New 
Almaden, were once producing quicksilver with all 
their might to send to IN'evada. As the miners are 
fond of saying, " It takes one mine to run another.^^ 

The end of all such prospecting, costly testing, ex- 



FINDING, TESTING, AND WORKING ORES. 89 

perimenting with ores, and building expensive mills in 
any new district, is that at last it is definitely determined 
whether or not the ores can be worked with profit. If 
not, the whole place goes to ruin. Mills, roads, shafts, 
tunnels, houses, hotels are deserted more rapidly than 
they were constructed, and everything is often aban- 
doned as not worth hauling out. Avalanches sweep 
away the buildings or they fall into ruins. Grizzly and 
panther prowl around the deserted camp where thou- 
sands of men had staked their hopes and fortunes. 
There are many such deserted towns in the barren 
mountains whose very names are forgotten. The men 
that founded them are dead; the trails are obliterated. 
There is no pasture, or forest, or farm land to tempt any 
one to dwell there again. It is a more profound desola- 
tion than the desolation of Tadmor or Mneveh. 

But if the ore is really rich, no matter how re- 
fractory, the story of a deserted mining camp is never 
sealed up and put away. As long as it remains an un- 
solved problem in metallurgy, it attracts tireless in- 
terest in the world of mining science until some new 
process — cyanide, or something else — is found to do 
the work. Till then, the best skill of the laboratories 
of America and Europe is focused upon the difiiculty, 
and new hosts of miners are only waiting the word 
from some discoverer to pour again into the ruined 
camp and dispossess the panther and the grizzly. 
Sometimes they find a lonely miner there who has held 
his claim a quarter of a century or more, waiting for 
some one to unlock the treasure-house; sometimes 
they find only his bones, for Science, unheeding, 
eternal, takes no count of human years. 



CHxiPTEE XI. 

GEEAT MECHANICAL PEOBLEMS SOLVED. 

Too much emphasis can hardly be put upon the 
purely business side of mining on a large scale, and 
the complete organization displayed therein. A fa- 
vourite device of the cheap mining-camp novel, intent 
on thrilling situations, is to populate the abandoned 
drifts and v^orked-out ore chambers with rival secret 
societies of regulators and desperadoes. Here crime 
"holds high carnival'^ through plot and counter- 
plot and mystic midnight sessions (even in mines such 
meetings must take place at the time-honoured hour). 
All this goes on for weeks without causing the slightest 
suspicion on the part of the honest miners or mine 
owners that outsiders are occupying the place in a 
sort of Box-and-Cox manner. Such a scene in a novel 
or on the stage is apt to rouse the rude laughter of 
those who know mines and mine owners as they really 
are. 

A quartz mine is always guarded with jealous care, 
especially if its shares are listed on the stock boards. 
ISTo one goes down without a permit, and certain por- 
tions of the mine are never visited except by the owner, 
the superintendent, and a few rehable men. The 
actual condition of the mine is only known to a few 
persons. Many times the whole mine is shut down 
to outsiders, so that even personal friends, newspaper 
reporters, and men of science are kept from any knowl- 
90 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 91 

edge of what is going on within. '] As a consequence 
of such systematized watchfulness, few persons ever 
see the whole working of a mine, and a multitude of 
absurd popular myths have arisen. In fact, most 
people never see anything of a quartz mine in opera- 
tion, for they are all difficult of access. Lastly, there 
is only a small proportion of those who do visit such 
a mine who ever obtain a true conception of the me- 
chanical problems involved in the gigantic task of 
working it successfully. 

Comstock miners say that it is evident that the 
preconceived ideas of most persons who visit Virginia 
City to see the mines are derived from quarries or coal 
mines, and neither are of much value in the case. A 
quarry of building stone, opened to the sky, certainly 
requires much and highly skilled labour to choose 
the valuable portions and reject the inferior, to clear 
away the refuse, and to cut and break out the required 
blocks. Expensive and powerful machinery is used. 
All" the surroundings of the occupation are large and 
free, so that the quarryman is a sturdy figure among 
craftsmen, but quarrying can not even be called an 
apprenticeship to quartz mining. A collier encounters 
many of the difficulties of the miner for metals, but 
others are equally unknown to him, and he often quar- 
ries along in the coal vein as easily and steadily as if 
he were breaking out slabs of sandstone from a wind- 
swept hillside. 

Mining is not well-digging or quarrying, even in 
the blanket deposits of Arizona, or the blanket veins of 
the Eand, though sometimes ore bodies are found that 
require little other labour. But every mine of the true 
fissure-vein type is an original and separate problem. 
Underlying the picturesque details are vast and ever- 
increasing difficulties, met or avoided by constantly 



92 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

developing human skilly rising in time of need to posi- 
tive genius^ so that a great mining engineer ranks with 
the builders of pyramids and Brooktyn bridges. 

As soon as the miner has succeeded in working his 
ore he knows, in terse camp language, that he " has 
a mine, and not a hole in the ground/^ Then he begins 
to " develop the mine '' — that is, he endeavours to 
ascertain its value and put it into shape for profitable 
working by explorations, necessarily very expensive, 
and by planning his operations, both on the surface 
and underground. The miners burrow their way 
through the earth, searching for precious metals, toiling 
through barren acres for weeks and months, or follow- 
ing threads of ore, streaks of clay, and a thousand 
" indications " that are Greek to the uninitiated, but 
which may lead at last to a rich deposit. They are 
beset by perils of flood and fire, of explosion, of f alhng 
rocks, of the collapse of roof, sides, or floor of the 
narrow places in which they toil. And, in the mining 
phrase, "no man can see an inch ahead of the end 
of a drift "; no diamond drill can take away the un- 
certainty of the business. The miner, in point of fact, 
is turned loose in the heart of the rocks and left to 
creep around there like an ant in a mountain. 

The Comstock, though called a lode, is really a 
broad metalliferous belt or ore channel. It contains 
many narrow lodes, disjointed strata, bunches and 
chimneys of ore, in distinct clefts, separated from each 
other by what the miners call " horses '^ or fragments 
of rock from either wall — fragments often a thou- 
sand feet long and several hundred feet thick; sepa- 
rated also by seams and patches of clay, gypsum, and 
carbonate of lime, by masses of quartz and dikes of 
porphyry. The minerals found in this great mass 
include native gold, native silver, stephanite, chloride 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 93 

of silver, galena, antimony, and several rare forms 
of silver, besides zinc blende, iron pyrites and copper 
pyrites. The whole body, constituting what miners 
call a vein, or vein matter, is lodged in a system of fis- 
sures rather than in one great fissure, and is walled 
in on the west by granite-like diorite which composes 
the mass of Mount Davidson and of other peaks and 
ridges. On the east side the hanging wall is diabase, 
which resembles basalt. But these irregular bounda- 
ries which confine the vein matter are merely the 
shattered edges of the vast chasm rent apart, closed 
together, and again forced asunder during the ages 
of volcanic action. Under interior chemical and dy- 
namic agencies reefs of quartz a hundred feet thick 
have been ground to dust, and the whole seething 
caldron of steam and fire, filled with minerals in solu- 
tion, has slowly cooled and settled into its present con- 
dition. 

The general direction of the vein is north and south, 
or rather it points a little east of the magnetic pole 
and conforms to some extent to the trend of the moun- 
tain. It is customary to include about twenty-two 
thousand linear feet in the vein, and its width varies 
from one hundred to twelve hundred feet. Some of the 
mines in this territory have paid largely, others have 
yielded little, and the fertile portions are comparatively 
limited. The vein was at first found to slope westward 
under Mount Davidson, but at a greater depth the 
slope is eastward under Virginia City, and the miners 
sank a second, and afterward a third, series of shafts 
east of the original line of shafts. In some cases they 
ultimately moved three thousand feet east for con- 
venience in working the mines. The general slope 
of the lode toward the east as one descends is fifty de- 
grees. 



94: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

The larger mechanical problems comiected with 
any mine relate to reaching and removing its various 
ore bodies; to preventing caves, fire, and other acci- 
dents; to efficient lighting, drainage, and ventilation; 
to obtaining in abundance the two essentials of mines, 
mills, and camps — wood and water; and, in conclusion, 
to the creation, maintenance, and constant enlarge- 
ment of the whole mining enterprise and of its in- 
numerable dependent industries, until, after the lapse 
of years, the mine or group of mines is worked out. 
One can easily see that all this implies the constant 
existence of a vast reserve force at or near every min- 
ing centre. There must be forges, foundries, machine 
shops, sawmills, upon a large scale; the finest special- 
ized talent must be witliin reach; inventors and men 
of original power are in demand, for not only fame 
and fortune, but life and death hang on the issues that 
an hour may bring forth. That which is needed in 
a great mine can and must be had. " Impossible " 
was never written in the miners' dictionary. 

The first serious mechanical difficulty that the 
early Comstockers had to surmount was forced upon 
them witliin a year or two, and the result was of pro- 
found interest to miners everwhere. Old Ophir, 
which had "paid from grass roots down," soon dis- 
carded the hand windlass and buckets with which 
it had started and put in a horse power, or " whim." 
After a few months a fifteen-horse-power steam engine 
was obtained to pump out the water through a four- 
inch pipe, to hoist ore, and carry men up and down. 
This engine was the " finest thing of its kind on the 
Comstock " when it began operations. 

Meanwhile, as Ophir's incline slowly descended, the 
rich vein grew wider and softer, until at the depth of 
one hundred and seventy-five feet it was forty or fifty 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 95 

feet across and of so crumbling a nature that pillars 
could not be left in sufficient numbers to support the 
roof. The ore body, a true bonanza, continued to widen 
as it descended, and soon the miners found it impossible 
to take out any more rock without extreme danger. 
Work was finally stopped in the mine, for the whole 
mass of vein matter and overhanging rock v/as slowly 
descending upon them. If the contents had been dia- 
monds instead of thousand-dollar tons of ore, the miners 
could not have taken out any more without inventing 
some new system of operation. The engineers were 
stumped also; there was no record of such a width of 
ore in any of the mining authorities. 

Of course there had been timbering done from the 
first. Posts and lintels had been used in shafts and 
drifts. In this system, the only one then known, round 
logs were set up at the sides, and another log was placed 
across them at the top as a cap. These frames were 
put as close together as possible, making a continuous 
sheathing of pine logs a foot or even two feet thick 
from the surface of the ground to the bottom of the 
incline and along every portion of the various drifts. 
In some cases the logs were rudely squared and then 
clamped and bolted together so that it would seem 
as if they would withstand any pressure. In ordinary 
mining much lighter timbering than this often proves 
sufficient, but in the Comstock the great width and the 
varying density of the vein matter made the slacking 
and swelling of the ground something unparalleled 
in mining history, and twisted the timbers awry in 
many instances. Besides, the miners could not work 
above or beneath such timbers without danger of dead- 
ly caves. Several, in fact, occurred, and a number of 
lives were lost. 

In this emergency a German miner in California, 



96 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

named Philipp Deideslieimer, wlio had been on the 
Pacific coast since 1851, came to the rescue. One of 
the San Francisco directors of Ophir, sending for him, 
asked, " What would you do if you had a quartz lode 
fifty or sixty feet wide ? " 

Deidesheimer replied that he had never heard of 
such a thing, but he had no doubt it could be handled. 
He would like to study the place. 

" Go to Virginia City to-morrow at our expense," 
said the director. 

Deidesheimer went down the Ophir shaft, and 
within a month, most of which time he spent under- 
ground in various tests and experiments, he began 
to open up what Ophir miners called the " third gal- 
lery,'' a chamber cut in the vein two hundred and fif- 
teen feet below the surface. It was noised about that 
Ophir was about to try a new system of timbering, 
and, as the old method had been proved inadequate 
in other mines, the men stopped work and came up to 
see the carpenters framing above ground the " square 
sets" that Mr. Deidesheimer ordered. They looked 
very insignificant, and some were disposed to laugh 
at the performance. 

" Square sets " consist of short, square timbers, four 
to six feet long, mortised and tenoned at the ends so 
that they can be put together in a series of interlocked 
cribs and built up in a continuous row or block to any 
desired height or width, filling the whole chamber 
as fast as the ore is removed. By using diagonal braces 
they can be indefinitely strengthened, or made to fill 
a chamber of any shape. They can be framed together 
solidly, as is often done, so that the ore is replaced 
by a mass of lumber, or waste rock can be used so as 
to make solid pillars from floor to roof, or even to fill 
the entire space. By February the Ophir mines were 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 97 

successfully " stoping out ore '' from wall to wall across 
a deposit which was sixty feet in width and yet was 
so soft that no blasting was required. By the time 
the sixth gallery was reached a space two hundred 
feet in length, sixty-five feet wide, and five hundred 
and sixty feet in depth had been emptied of ore and 
was kept from falling by means of the square-sets sys- 
tem of support. Beyond a doubt " square sets " could 
often be used to support the roofs of coal-mines, where 
so many caves occur when the whole vein is removed. 

German, English, and French engineers came from 
Europe to examine and report upon the new Com- 
stock system of working ore bodies. They declared 
that it " could no more be improved upon than the cells 
of a honeybee." In soft rock and hard rock, at any 
angle or across any distance, the square sets became 
indispensable to all miners working large ore bodies. 
The idea was never patented, and so it became the com- 
mon property of mining men the world over. It was 
the first of the famous Comstock methods that gave 
the lode a reputation. 

But although every one recognised the importance 
of Mr. Deidesheimer's invention, which at a single 
stroke had solved the first practical difficulty that con- 
fronted the early miners, his system was often careless- 
ly and grudgingly used. Cave after cave occurred, 
filling up the excavations, crushing men and timbers 
together, and rending the surface of the earth into 
chasms. ISTone of these caves occurred in Ophir, of 
which Deidesheimer was now superintendent. 

The dangers that were obviated by the proper use 
of the square-set timbers are well exhibited in these 
early caves. Eew occurred in 1861, but in the spring 
of 18G2, when the snows melted and the surface waters 
of the Comstock increased in volume, clumsy super- 



98 THE STOPwY OF THE MINE. 

intendents suffered, for a number of mines were 
closed by falling debris, clay, and rock. A few mine 
owners heeded the warning and put in better timbering 
when the drifts were cleared. Mexican — which, as 
previously noted, was very old-fashioned in its meth- 
ods — ^became in the summer of 1863, as the Territorial 
Enterprise said, " a lovely chaos." One half the sur- 
face of the mine fell with a frightful clamour which 
roused Virginia City, and an acre of the surface was 
opened to the depth of nearly two hundred and fifty 
feet, as if dynamite had been exploded underneath. 
There had been incessant and unmistakable warnings 
for weeks and months; the workmen had reported 
props twisted and bent, cap timbers broken, and dull 
noises of jdelding earth and quartz. The superin- 
tendent and twenty miners were below, but, fortunate- 
ly, were near the bottom of the incline, and so escaped, 
while the enormous mass, already beginning to fall, 
had half closed the passages. 

While the miners were learning how to protect 
their shafts, drifts, tunnels, chambers, and various 
underground workings, the enemy of all miners — water 
— ^was becoming the chief obstacle. Noachian del- 
uges of water, seeping continually out of every part 
of the porous vein matter which received the drain- 
age of the mountains, threatened to compel the aban- 
donment of the Comstock, as a similar reason had 
caused the ruin of some of the most productive min- 
ing districts of Spain, Mexico, and Peru. Durango's 
famous Eeal del Monte mine was flooded for fifty 
years. The other day, in California, a mine was pumped 
out which had lain useless since 1860, and it is now 
yielding at the rate of $50,000 a year. 

By 1861 Ophir had a pumping engine of forty-five 
horse power to raise the water to a point where it could 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 99 

be discharged through a tunnel, and ten or twelve other 
pumping engines were on the lode then or soon after. 
The miners had learned to avoid as far as possible the 
wetter points of the lode and the water reservoirs in 
clay, but this system of creeping past the worst places 
could only be a temporary expedient. Sometimes the 
careless stroke of a pick cut into a " water pocket " and 
forced the men to run from the drift, pursued by a tor- 
rent. Large areas of profitable mining ground were 
neglected through fear of the water, and sometimes 
drifts had to be closed by walls of masonry. Fortu- 
nately, at this stage of affairs the water was compara- 
tively cold, not boiling, as afterward on the lower 
levels. 

Larger pumps were placed on the leading mines. 
Best and Belcher, in 1864, bought a pump of twelve 
inches bore, and were then able to reopen some of their 
underground works. Crown Point, Overman, Ophir, 
Justice, Uncle Sam, and Yellow Jacket won unde- 
sired pre-eminence as "wet mines." Ophir struck a 
water pocket in 1864 that rose one hundred and sixty 
feet in the shafts and long defied the pumps. Belcher, 
when lifting 1,017,878 gallons every twenty-four hours, 
found the pumps too weak to extend work below the 
420-foot level. Engines of five hundred horse power 
were put into operation, and the finest inventive sldll 
of the Pacific coast was called into service. 

There came a time when eight or ten million gallons 
must be lifted daily from the Comstock. More power- 
ful pumping machinery than ever before used in the 
history of mining was constructed to drain the lode. 
The iron works of San Francisco became known for 
the excellence and originality of their mining ma- 
chinery. Comstock pumps, by a number of successive 
adaptations and small inventions rather than by any 
8 



100 THE STOEY OF THE MINE. 

single epoch-marking discovery, reached the highest 
degree of efficiency known to engineers. 

Pioneer Virginia City had numbers of wells and 
a little water from springs. Some of the wells were 
soon drained dry by the mining shafts and tunnels. 
In the local phrase, the "bottom fell out/' and the 
term was soon appHed to any sudden collapse in the 
stock market. There were instances on record of men 
who were drawing water in their back yards being 
surprised at seeing the water suddenly disappear in 
a chasm or crevice, some drift or '' upraise " in the 
vast underground world of the Comstockers having 
tapped the reservoir. The springs in the district, small 
and few in number, suffered in much the same way. 

Even the surface water of Gold Hill and Virginia 
City was abominable, even to those used to the bitter 
water of the desert. It " alkalied people " in the con- 
cise southwest phrase — that is, it often made them 
weak, and acted something like a dose of physic. One 
or two surface springs fed by snows were better, but 
these were very small; and as for the water from wells, 
nothing could easily be worse except the water from 
the lov/er levels of the mines. Eoss Browne, in his 
Peep at Washoe, remarked that the water was certainly 
the worst ever used by man. The miners, humbly de- 
sirous of improving the quality of their drinks, used 
to mix " a spoonful of water with half a tumblerful of 
whislq^'^ 

Evidently the highly mineralized vein matter of 
the great fissures, such as the Comstock and others, 
was more or less a part of every cup of water. The 
dream of the alchemists of silver and of gold in potable 
form was realized, and still the Comstockers were not 
happy. Antimony, copperas, arsenic, and a few other 
substances quite as injurious to health were present 



GREAT MECHANICAL PEOBLEMS SOLVED. IQl 

in the water. Nevada papers printed innumerable 
items, grave and gay, on the subject of Virginia City 
water. They assured the ladies that nothing else was 
half so good for the complexion as arsenic water; they 
congratulated the men on their improved lungs and 
capacity to climb to the top of Mount Davidson (like 
so many young Malcolm Graemes breasting Ben 
Lomond). 

Then followed, to make a long story short, a search 
for water of good quality and abundant in quantity. 
It must be had at any cost. When there were only 
two or three thousand people in Virginia City and 
along the divide, men were tapping the adjacent peaks 
with short tunnels, trying to find water. When the 
population increased tenfold and twentyfold the prob- 
lem was even more pressing. A " water-claim " excite- 
ment had set in, until hundreds of men were prospect- 
ing in the hills to find and reservoir water. They 
searched the flat-topped hills and heads of ravines; 
they tried to save water from the melting snows and 
keep it pure and cool for summer use. Miles upon 
miles of tunnels were blasted out of the granite and 
other hard rocks and walled up at their entrances. Old 
shafts, long abandoned, were also utilized as reservoirs. 
The barren, treeless hills north and south along the 
ridge of the Washoe Mountains were bored into in 
this manner, and the water from a thousand such 
sources was carried in pipes or small wooden flumes to 
Gold Hill and Virginia City. IsTevertheless, the supply 
fell short every summer, and the natural reservoirs 
of water in the hills appeared to lessen very noticeably 
until the situation became even more serious. 

While mills, mines, and growing towns were suffer- 
ing for a pure and sufficient water suppl}-, the Sierras 
were overflowing with pure mountain water, and 



102 THE STOHY OF THE MINE. 

thither the energies and capital of the Comstock 
were to be directed. For a time the project, though 
often urged, lay dormant. At length, after a season 
of extraordinary drought, the miners, accustomed by 
this time to daring enterprises, formed a company 
and began surveys to the Lake Tahoe region. 

The complete story extends over a long period, 
but it properly belongs here, as the culminating achieve- 
ment in the line of mechanical problems. Distance, 
though about twenty-five miles over a rough country, 
was the least of the different elements to be considered 
by the engineers. They found that it was practicable 
to carry the water from a large mountain stream, Ho- 
bart Creek, by a fourteen-mile flume along a spur of 
the Sierras, to a point nearly two thousand feet above 
the floor of Washoe Yalley. But Washoe, Carson, and 
other valleys formed a complete chain of depressions 
about the Virginia City region, and isolated the Washoe 
and Flowery ranges. They wanted to carry the water 
across this trough-like valley and deliver it at a point 
1,720 feet higher, on the Virginia Eidge, so as to sup- 
ply the towns and furnish hydraulic power. Clearly 
it was not practicable to pump nearly eighteen hundred 
feet, as the cost of the machinery and expenses of opera- 
tion would be prohibitory. Mr. Henry Schiissler there- 
fore advised the construction of an inverted siphon 
which could stand a pressure of eight hundred pounds 
to the square inch, the equivalent of a perpendicular 
pressure of a column of 1,720 feet of water. Pipe sec- 
tions twelve inches in interior diameter had to be united 
hermetically. The length required to cross the valley 
was 38,300 feet. 

It took a year to make the pipe. Each section fitted 
a particular place. Every curve and angle of the route 
was mapped out and measured accurately, and the 



GREAT MECHANICAL PROBLEMS SOLVED. 103 

wrought iron used corresponded perfectly with, the 
diagram before it left the workshops. The pipe un- 
dulates into and out of thirteen steep gulches, and 
makes many lateral curves. It is laid deep under- 
ground, and at each point of depression there is a 
" blow-off " cock, to drive out any sediment. On the 
top of each ridge is an air cock. There are 1,150,000 
pounds of rolled iron in the seven miles required for the 
siphon, and it is held together by about a million rivets 
and fifty-two thousand pounds of melted lead. Over 
each joint is an iron band set with molten lead, and 
442,500 additional pounds of iron were used in this 
way. 

At last, in 1873, water leaped out of the pipe into 
the channel of Bullion Eavine and flowed into a flume 
that carried it into Virginia City. " The crowd were 
as wild with joy as were the Israelites when Moses smote 
the rock," said the Territorial Enterprise. All day 
long the people of the towns drank the sweet water 
and watched its musical flowing. Two million dollars 
had been well spent to supply the Comstock with water 
from the Sierras. The total amount furnished was 
about two million gallons daily, but it was insufficient, 
and after the great fire of 1875 a second siphon line 
was laid. A third line was afterward constructed and 
ample reservoirs provided. The theoretical capacity 
of all three pipes is about ten million gallons daily, 
curiously corresponding to the amount of water lifted 
at times from the lode, but six million gallons was 
about the highest daily consumption. The mines 
used the larger part of the supply. 

Previous to the successful laying of the first Washoe 
Yalley siphon the greatest pressure under which water 
had ever been carried, so far as known, was at Cherokee 
Flat, California, where the supply of a large hydraulic 



104: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

mine v^as taken across a canon nine hundred and ten 
feet deep by an inverted siphon. The fame of the Vir- 
ginia City exploit went abroad and attracted more en- 
gineers to study the water system than even the mine 
timbering or the great Comstock pumps. 

Thus, while the miners were laboriously running 
drainage tunnels and pumping out floods of worthless 
water, they were also siphoning their drinking water 
from the Sierras, and in such a manner that several 
hundred feet of fall was obtained for the develop- 
ment of hydraulic power, all of which was soon utilized 
to run pumps, to furnish electric lights, and for a vast 
number of milling and mining purposes. 



CHAPTER XII. 

DEPENDENT INDUSTEIES. 

It is difficult to classify all the different types of 
men who help to make a mining camp. Certainly the 
prospector, the miner, and the mill builder form the 
central group, but hardly less important and equally in- 
teresting are the freighter, the lumberman, the builder 
of roads, the stage driver, and others who deserve more 
than passing notice. One can hardly say which of these 
comes first in point of time. The mines needed lumber 
and firewood from the day of their discovery. Build- 
ing of roads began at the same time, and freighting 
and stage driving were easy to men who had taken 
trains of donkeys and pack mules across the Sierras 
when the rush to Washoe began. 

All the summer and autumn of 1859 new trails were 
being hewn out on the sides of the Sierras and the old 
ones were being broadened so that a wagon could cross. 
The famous old emigrant road through Johnson's 
Pass from the head of Carson Valley to Placerville (in 
old days known as Hangtown) had once been worn 
down to something like a practicable grade, but travel 
along it diminished so rapidly after 1855 that much 
of it had fallen into very bad condition. The second 
great route, already marked out by a road that could 
be used in summer, was by way of Nevada City and 
Ilenness Pass. 

During 18 GO the usual method of the miners who 
105 



106 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

wished to open a new district rapidly — the building of 
toll roads — was adopted. In fact there had been a 
little toll-road work in Western Utah before 1859, 
and the greater number of the fine mountain roads 
of California in the ^50's and ^60's were built and kept 
up by private enterprise. Some of them were more 
profitable than most of the mines. The Territory of 
iN'evada had hardly been organized before a fierce con- 
test between those who desired toll-road franchises 
occupied the first session of the Legislature. Dan De 
Quille said that if all these franchises had been granted 
and the roads built, they would have not only filled 
the Territory, but would have hung far out into the 
desert like a fringe. 

Neither California nor Nevada has since had moun- 
tain roads under the ordinary laws of pubhc construc- 
tion and maintenance, by local districts or counties, 
that begin to equal the firm, broad turnpikes of the 
old toll-road days. This is true even in those districts 
where the population has remained fully equal to that 
of thirty years ago. The noble art of making high- 
ways worthy of the alpine passes was lost when the 
teamster and the freighter disappeared. 

The main Placerville toll road in the days of its 
completeness — ^from 1862 till 1868 — was graded with 
consummate skill from the edge of the Sacramento 
Yalley across the Sierras, across the Carson, and up 
Gold Canon to Virginia City. At all the turning points 
were wide platforms walled with stones, firmly but- 
tressed against storm and avalanche — platforms so broad 
that a ten-mule team could easily turn upon them. 
Trains of twelve or even eighteen animals harnessed 
to three wagons joined in line together could pass at 
any point on the roadway. Half a million dollars 
was the original cost of this macadamized road a hun- 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 107 

dred and one miles long from Placerville to Virginia 
City. The yearly expense of maintenance was two, 
three, or sometimes five thousand dollars a mile, accord- 
ing to the season. Stations were built at regular dis- 
tances, and in winter the road was kept as clear from 
snow-drifts as it was kept free from dust in summer. 
Swan & Co., who owned some twenty miles of the dis- 
tance, received fifty thousand dollars annually over and 
above the cost of maintenance. The total cost of tolls 
between Sacramento City and Virginia City in 1863 was 
about fifteen dollars for a four-horse team; each addi- 
tional animal cost a dollar and a half. 

Between 1860 and 1862 four-mule teams were com- 
monly seen, but after 1862 the number increased, for 
the roads improved and the teamsters knew their busi- 
ness better. One saw sixteen mules harnessed to a high 
Washoe wagon or to a train of three or four wagons 
coupled together. Similar outfits often extended for 
miles in such close lines across the highway that it 
was like a double procession. If a wagon broke down, 
the moving line swung around it if possible and went 
on unless help was needed. If an unlucky teamster 
fell out of line he sometimes had to wait for hours be- 
fore he could fall in again. 

Four hundred teams were being used in 1860; six 
hundred were engaged in 1861; by the summer of 
1862 the San Francisco Bulletin said that there were 
nine hundred and fifty teams in the business, and the 
freighters were paid not less than three million dollars, 
including tolls. In 1863 came a great increase. Ac- 
cording to an editorial in the Sacramento Union, 2,772 
teams, consisting of 14,652 animals, were employed, 
and nearly twenty million pounds of freight passed 
through Strawberry Valley in eight weeks, which rep- 
resents one third of the season's work. Another esti- 



108 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

mate was that eighty-eight million pounds of freight 
went over Johnson's Pass every year, at an average 
cost of six cents a pound, or $5,280,000. A more com- 
plete estimate was made by the builders of the Central 
Pacific Eailroad. Anxious to determine how much 
business they could reasonably expect when their lines 
crossed the Sierras, they sent out agents who, after in- 
vestigation, thought that one hundred million pounds 
really went by the Placerville route and half as much 
by the other routes. Fifteen thousand draught animals 
and three thousand men v/ere employed in this great 
industry. ISTearly a hundred stations, at each one of 
which there were stables, hotels, saloons, and stores, 
were built on the Placerville route. The road was a 
continuous double line of close-packed travel all sum- 
mer, and life on the famous highway was infinitely 
more picturesque than on any railroad. 

These trains of mountain wagons — slow-moving, 
vast — contained dry goods, provisions, tools, machinery, 
and merchandise of all descriptions produced in every 
part of the world, shipped to San Francisco across the 
Isthmus or around Cape Horn, reshipped to Sacra- 
mento, and there loaded into the waiting caravans. 
It is easy to see that this swiftly developing traffic made 
towns and cities spring up in a single season along 
its track. But there was more to the business than 
this single river of commerce flowing through the 
Golden Gate to Nevada. It was a river that received 
countless tributaries. It was fed ceaselessly by almost 
every man, woman, and child in ten thousand square 
miles of mountains. The mines made a better market 
than the valleys for hay and grain, for fruit and wine, 
for hogs and cattle, for eggs and poultry. ISTeglected 
pioneer orchards and vineyards were pruned and culti- 
vated, so that the grapes, apples, peaches, and other 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 109 

products of old-time California horticulture might be 
sent to the new camps of Nevada, where they brought 
almost the old prices of ^49. 

The appearance of Washoe wagon trains was always 
extremely striking and attractive. The wagons were 
peculiarly effective for the work required. They were 
not prairie schooners, or ships of the desert, or square- 
built ore wagons, but better, stronger, higher than any 
of these, and supplied with brake blocks that could 
be gripped by a lever upon a yard or more of the pe- 
riphery of each hind wheel. They marked in every 
detail the utmost skill of the Pacific-coast workers in 
■wood and iron, and were in their way as distinct cre- 
ations of adaptive and evolutionary genius as the moun- 
tain stagecoach of the period or the Mississippi River 
steamboat in days before railroads. Of course many 
different types of wagons were pressed into service, 
the demand being so great, and one could see the famous 
Conemaughs, Missouri sail-tops, lumbering ranch 
wagons, and other types of Eastern manufacture. But 
the wrought iron of the California blacksmith, the 
imported ash and hickory shaped by the California 
carpenter under the direction of the leading spirits 
of the freighting business, made the most popular com- 
bination, though it cost two and three times as much 
as the imported article. 

Horses could not stand the work, oxen were too 
slov/; but large, well-bred mules, which cost from two 
hundred to four hundred dollars apiece, were the fa- 
vourite draught animals. Oregon furnished many, and 
stock farms in the California valleys, chiefly owned by 
Southerners who selected their stock with great care, 
sold thousands of mules to the Sierra teamsters. Fine, 
strong animals, kept constantly groomed and in the 
best possible condition, were in these mountain mule 



110 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

teams. The long trains came gaily into Virginia City- 
after crossing the Sierras and climbing up from Car- 
son Valley. Each animal had a row of small bright 
bells hanging from an iron arch over his neck. Great 
squares of combed and glossy bearskin — black, brown, 
or grizzly — covered the collars. All the metal of the 
harness ghstened in the snnHght, while the leather was 
clean, flexible, and black. 

Bearded, weather-beaten men walked beside the 
wagons or rode one of the mules, or sat at times on 
high, perched dizzily on the wagon seat above the tar- 
paulins which were always strapped carefully over the 
goods to prevent their being injured by dust or by sud- 
den Sierra storms. Mark them well! JSTo better race of 
sturd}^, faithful mountain men were ever bred in fruit- 
ful America. ISTot merchants these, or prospectors, or 
speculators, but a brave, honest outdoor race whose 
huge "Washoe wagons were the forerunners of the rail- 
roads. It was their business to furnish supplies to the 
miners and to all who lived by the work of the mines, 
but many of them went through all those pioneer years 
without ever entering a mine or owning a dollar's worth 
of stock in any one of the thousands of mining claims 
they passed and repassed. 

Where this army of freighters came from no one 
could tell any more than one could classify the pros- 
pectors. A large number, however, had been the 
owners of mountain ranches before the rush to Washoe 
began, and had taken their own teams for the new work 
offered. Then, as their capital increased, they bought 
better wagons, better teams, and so still remained their 
own masters, occasionally hiring assistance or having 
outfits to rent, but always taking the brunt of the work 
on their own shoulders. Some of them were from the 
desert, where they had freighted goods for years to 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. HI 

the isolated settlements; some were from the high 
passes of the Eockies and had heard the whistle of 
Indian arrows in fortress-like camps with fellow-team- 
sters, wagon locked with wagon, a ring of wheels set 
with rifle barrels. A few gray and taciturn old freight- 
ers had once belonged to that fighting advance guard 
of the Americans, the famous teamsters of the New 
Orleans and St. Louis caravans on the old Santa Fe 
trail. 

These freighters were noted for their honesty, so- 
briety, and business-like attention to every detail. 
Each one of them had thousands of dollars' worth of 
goods intrusted to his care without security other than 
his simple receipt. He carried these goods to the mines 
and delivered them to the consignees, taking their 
receipts. If there was ore to be freighted back across 
the mountains, he loaded up at the mouth of the mine, 
gave the mine owner his receipt, and took one in 
turn from the Sacramento banker or the speculator in 
ores. 

The freighter's characteristic rod of empire was 
his whip — a long, close-plaited lash as big as one's wrist 
at the swelling part, and attached to a short hickory 
handle. When he held the staff upright and slowly 
waved it from the roadside the intelligent leaders would 
obey every motion, turn a loaded wagon or halt at the 
command, for they knew by sad experience the capacity 
for inflicting punishment that lay hidden in that ser- 
pentine coil, terrible as a South African jambok of 
green hippopotamus hide. The freighter's besetting- 
sin, like the soldier's, was the uttering of " strange 
oaths," though it is said that in this respect he yielded 
the palm of fierce originality to the ^^bull-puncher," 
the man of ox teams in the logging camps. 

Organization soon began to manifest itself among 



112 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

the freighters. They had an association to fix rates 
before the close of 18 GO, when twenty-five cents a 
pound was the iisnal sum charged between Sacramento 
and Virginia City. Rates necessarily came dov/n, as 
outsiders entered the bnsiness with all sorts of convey- 
ances, so that for a short time in 1862 goods were 
hanled for two cents a pound. But the freighters, 
nearly all of them owning their own teams, soon formed 
a Union that remained impregnable nntil the railroad 
was built. The equipments of the members of the asso- 
ciation were so complete that they could do better work 
than any ordinary teamsters. At first they were 
able to haul a thousand pounds of freight for every 
animal used, but eventually they became able to move 
three times as much — sixteen-mule teams actually drew 
twenty-four tons besides the wagons. 

In the course of time, as mining camps were 
founded here, there, and everywhere beyond Virginia 
City north, south, and east, the sphere of the freighter 
was extended, and retiring slowly from the Sierras 
as the railroad advanced, he became one of the most 
distinctive and universal characters of the I^evada 
mining districts. Dr. Gaily has forever fixed the type 
in his Big Jack Small, a famous story of the desert, 
whose hero is a plain old ore freighter of the Elko silver 
district. Considered as ]3ure literature, the story is 
not inferior to Bret Harte^s earlier tales of the Cali- 
fornia placer camps; regarded simply as cr3^stallized 
fact, it would be difficult to find its equal in the whole 
range of Western writings. The school of the inde- 
pendent freighter — ^the Jack Small kind of a man — 
trained some of the most able business men, politicians 
and owners of stock farms, on the Pacific coast. Last- 
ly, it is to be noted, in bidding the freighter farewell, 
that stage robbers and highvraymen stood in deadly 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 113 

fear of his six-shooter and rifle. So far as I can ascer- 
tain, no case of loss of goods in transit, either by fraud, 
force, or carelessness, daring all the years of the freight- 
ers' glory is on record in courts or newspapers. 

Besides the freighter, the great mountain high- 
ways fairly swarmed with travel of other sort: men on 
horseback or in buggies and other conveyances; farmers 
with country produce; the blanket-brigade prospectors 
with pack donkeys; drovers with sheep, hogs, and 
cattle. All were interesting, but the stages, owned 
by different companies and making a business of tak- 
ing people to and from Washoe, were the most strik- 
ing features of the procession. 

One stage company, the Pioneer Line, owned 
twelve fine coaches in 1863, and carried nearly twelve 
thousand passengers from California to Nevada and 
eight thousand back to California. The fare was 
twenty-seven dollars from Sacramento to Virginia City 
by the Placerville route. The annual receipts were 
about five hundred and forty thousand dollars, besides 
a liberal United States allowance for carrying mails. 
Six or seven hundred horses were in the stables, and 
scores of men were employed in caring for them. The 
stage drivers were aristocrats of the road, receiving 
from two himdred to tv\^o hundred and fifty dollars a 
month besides unlimited adulation. 

Two other companies, the California and the 
Nevada, used the Henness Pass route, and carried be- 
tween them about as many passengers as the Pioneer 
Line. ISTow and then competing lines were put on, but 
as the first companies in the field had taken possession 
of most of the possible locations for stage stations, 
they held a practical monopoly of the business. In 
1863 the three companies received about $1,200,000, 
and the annual amount probably increased consider- 



114: THE STORY OF THE MIXE. 

ably above this figure before the staging era came to 
an end. 

The stage ride across the Sierras became known 
abroad as one of the Xew World's unique pleasures. 
Tourists admired it greatly and called it the glory of 
the journey across the continent. First the rich Sacra- 
mento YaUey in the heat of summer, golden with har- 
vests for miles under the park-like forests of giant 
oaks, and beside the rivers lined with maples, cotton- 
woods, sj^amores, and festooned with wild grapes; next 
the foothills, low-mounded, clothed with late flowers, 
shrubs, and scattered trees, full of springs and bright 
with fruitful orchards and gay gardens; then the forest 
belt, the noble coniferous forests of the Sierras, the 
pines and cedars, the scattered groups of Sequoias, the 
mountain laurel, ceanothus, azalea, dogwood, and won- 
derful natural growths of the Great Eange. Ever}^- 
where new landscapes met the gaze; at each new turn 
the traveller saw lakes, waterfalls flinging their spray 
upon the road, ice-cold springs bursting forth and slip- 
ping down the hillside through wildernesses of tangled 
bloom. He looked down dizzy precipices upon the 
tops of giant pines; he looked up to arching forests 
overhead, and far above them the barren granite crags, 
snow-crowned, gleaming against the sky of heaven's 
clearest, most cloudless blue. From the summit of 
the Pass they saw the hyacinthine waters of sealike 
Tahoe, and farther east, beyond sharp descents and 
treeless hills, the level desert stretched out of sight, 
seemingly as vast and as trackless as ocean itself. _^ 

Such were the general features, with inflnite varia- 
tions in detail, so that even old stage drivers were heard 
to say that they enjoyed the outlook more every time 
they crossed the summit. Springtime in the valley 
meant alpine winter on the heights. Summer in the 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 115 

farm lands meant the flush of spring in the passes, 
where brilhant blue and golden flowers and new grass 
were Just looking forth at the edge of the snowdrifts. 
As for the desert, it was like the mountains and the 
ocean, a thing of infinite moods. Into that corrugated 
basin the short, swift streams of the eastern slope of 
the Sierras descend to disappear; the ^'^ eastward-gazing 
grizzly bear," to quote from one of Dr. Gally's stories, 
" lifts his flexible nostrils to snuff the odours of the arid 
waste, then slowly turns and prowls westward." Be- 
yond is the " great empire of Artemisia," where gold 
and silver " were married in the volcanic chamber of 
the awful past." You see the nature of it from the 
mountain top — this land of Washoe with its browns 
and grays, its arid junipers and dull nut-pines on the 
rocks, its dark mountains of limestone, basalt, por- 
phyry, granite, in naked barrenness. "Underfoot," 
writes Dr. Gaily, ** the world is dark, gray, and silent. 
Overhead, during the long cloudless day, it is pale- 
blue, dry, silent. All abroad, it is gray or dark with 
mountain distance, and it is silent." Silence is every- 
where. jNTo "roar of far-off torrents tumbling down 
the hills to jar the night air underneath the stars — 
the stars still are, but all the torrents have departed." 
Time was, at some lost period backward of all dates, 
" when the Great High Sheriff of the Universe in open 
court has cried ^ Silence! ' and has been obeyed." 

All day long, from dusk of dawn to twilight, the 
swift, hard struggle to get mails and passengers across 
the Sierras continued. At times relays of coaches were 
kept up all night, with profit to the companies. Never 
before in the history of transportation was the tireless 
energy of men and animals and the value of thorough 
organization and lavish expenditure better exemplified 
than during the best days of the old Pioneer stage line. 
9 



116 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

The schedule time by stage from Sacramento to Vir- 
ginia City — one hundred and sixty-two miles — was 
three days in 1860, and it was often hard to make con- 
nections; by 1863 the schedule time had been reduced 
to eighteen hours, and passengers could go on without 
stopping except for meals, or they could stay over one 
night on the road. Three wealthy mining operators 
who wished to reach San Francisco as soon as possible 
were once taken by the Pioneer stage line from Vir- 
ginia City to the wharf at Sacramento in twelve hours 
and twenty-three minutes. The steamer was ready 
to cast off, and in less than two minutes they were on 
their way down the river. 

Accidents occurred, as might have been expected, 
when several thousand men and twenty thousand horses 
and mules were daily strung out somewhere along the 
rocky highways. The freight lines opened to let the 
stages through, but droves of wild Mexican cattle were 
not so accommodating, and sometimes overturned the 
coaches. Masses of earth and stone sKd into the road; 
horses stumbled and fell, dragging others with them. 
On one occasion a large grizzly bear ran across the road, 
frightening a stage team; the horses reared, ran partly 
around the coach, and broke the pole; the passengers 
" leaped off and out in every direction." A stage on 
Johnson's Pass once toppled over a bank and caught 
in the top of a tough-limbed Sierra pine; the passengers 
crav/led out unhurt and reached the ground by drop- 
ping from limb to limb. It was a thousand feet to the 
bottom of the caiion vrhere they would have landed if 
the pine tree had happened to grov/ somewhere else. 

The pioneer stage driver of the Nevada-California 
lines was as different from the freighter as two classes 
of men could possibly be. One finds him occasionally 
in these days on the short stage lines left in the moun- 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 117 

tains, but " Icliabod " is written upon the occupation, 
and the whole attitude of the drivers toward life shows 
it. Once they took all the celebrities of the Pacific 
coast over the Sierras, and had the delightful knowl- 
edge that governors, generals, mine presidents, and 
millionaires were laying plans to cut out each other 
and to possess in sole ownership the " seat by the 
driver," the best seat on the coach. Once they were 
distinctly at the top of mountain society, the unchal- 
lenged lions of the wayside inns, privileged characters, 
story-tellers at whose slightest word the loud laugh 
went around. Now they drive " mud- wagons " for the 
most part, that two or four horses can manage. Wages 
have fallen to two dollars a day; horses, harness, and 
everything else have deteriorated in like proportion, 
and the fragments of the old highways are hardly as 
good as the emigrants of 1849 left them. 

These Jehus of the 'GO's are better than old files of 
newspapers. They can give you, if they choose, the 
very tones in which the judge summed up his charge 
to some sage-brush jury, the speeches of the lawyers 
when Ophir was fighting Burning Moscow, the talk 
of once-famous operators rushing across the Sierras 
with relays of horses. The glow and passion of the days 
they love to remember lingers still in their voices; they 
have stories of hunters told first in camps whose very 
names are forgotten, stories of outlaws in the Sierras, 
stories quaint, humorous, pathetic, gathered from thou- 
sands of brilliant and original characters who have 
travelled with them. 

But there is still another class of outside industries 
created by the Comstock. Supplies and passenger 
travel were not more important to the mining camps 
than wood for fuel, for building, and for the timbering 
of the shafts, drifts, and other underground workings. 



118 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Wood choppers and lumbermen have always been 
prominent anxiliaries of every mine. By the winter 
of 1866 the price of firewood rose to fifty dollars a cord, 
and as retailed by the Chinese with burro trains to 
sixty and seventy dollars. The towns and mills along 
the great lode used by this time two hundred thou- 
sand cords of wood annually. Since the mills managed 
to get their wood for ten dollars, and since all provident 
persons laid in their whole supply in summer, it is not 
likely that more than $2,500,000 was actually spent. 
Still, that was a very large sum to pay out for the fuel 
supply of so few people. 

Of equally vital importance was the supply of clear 
lumber of the best quality. This could not be furnished 
by the brittle, knotty nut-pine of Nevada. A few 
forests were within the reach of the pioneer sawmills 
of AVashoe and the upper Carson, but the prices were 
practically prohibitory of improvements. Then came 
an increasing demand from the lower levels of the 
mines, " Give us more lumber or we can not keep on 
drifting out ore even with our ' square-set ' system 
of supports.^^ The men of the mines cast longing 
glances over at the mighty forests of pine and cedar 
on the slopes of the Sierras. The bull-punchers and 
the small sawmills around Carson could no longer sup- 
ply half the demands of the Comstock lode. 

" More! More! " the insatiate miners cried, and the 
time came when eighty million feet of lumber annually 
went down into the chambers and drifts, and two hun- 
dred and fifty thousand cords of wood were burned 
annually by the Comstock towns and mills. The lum- 
ber that was put into the mines was crushed, forced 
together into solid masses by the weight of moving 
mountains above. One single mine has often buried 
lumber at the rate of six million feet a year. 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 119 

It was plainly possible to continue to cut wagon 
roads to various points along the eastern slope of the 
Sierras, even to the top, and then haul logs to the saw- 
mills in Washoe Valley. This was done for a time, and, 
if continued, might have developed as extensive a log- 
ging business with ox teams as the handling of supplies 
had already developed in the freighting line. The 
bull-puncher might then have become as notable and 
universal a figure as his brothers of the Sierra high- 
ways. But the cost of road-maldng was enormous, 
owing to the ravages of winter storms, and some better 
method was needed. 

In conveniently steep places, where deep water 
could be had by a dam, or in a lake, short chutes of 
tree trunks were made down which large logs could be 
slid headlong, flaming and smoking from the friction of 
their rapid descent. There were only a few places where 
this could be done without injuring the timber. Un- 
less the grade was very steep the logs would not slide. 
Various other plans were tried. Ordinary square-box 
flumes were constructed instead of the dry chutes, and 
were carried for many miles up the winding canons. 

The square-flume plan did not long remain in use, 
for in 1866 or 1867 experiments were made by a lum- 
berman named Haines, in Kingsbury Canon, with a 
simple form of trough that has since been adopted in 
every mountainous region of the Pacific coast — the 
famous V-flume. Haines took rough planks two feet 
wide, an inch and a half thick, and sixteen feet long, 
and joined them at right angles, lapping successive 
sections to make any desired length. The flume rested 
on the hillside, with props against the lower side, and 
was carried across canons on trestle work. The next 
improvement was to join the sections evenly b}^ a V- 
joint underneath. After a few years flumes of this 



120 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

pattern were made much larger and were lined with 
planed boards. 

This invention, one of the most interesting of the 
mining period, came at a time when the Californians 
had spent large sums trying to handle cheaply and 
rapidly the immense bodies of timber on the long west- 
ern slopes of the Sierras where several species of conifers 
m^ake trees that are often ten or tv/elve feet in diameter 
and two hundred and fifty feet high. They adopted 
the I^evada V-flume system with modifications, plac- 
ing large mills in the forests and moving the sawed 
lumber in form for market, millions of feet annually, 
delivering it in the valley below. On the eastern slopes 
of the Sierras the descent is much more abrupt and 
broken, and the trees are smaller than on the western 
slopes. Here the grade of the flumes was often four 
feet to a rod; logs and lumber were swept down in 
torrents of white foam, and sometimes, when jammed, 
were hurled into the air as if by a powerful explosive. 
Many mountain slopes which could never have been 
reached by the bull-punchers were easily cleared by 
using these short, steep flumes. 

One of the largest V-flumes ever built in ISTevada 
Yias fifteen miles long and contains two million feet 
of lumber. It carried five hundred cords of wood, or 
half a million feet of lumber, either sawed or in logs, 
in a single day. In 1880 ten flumes were reported by 
the Surveyor General, covering in all eighty miles. 
The amount of firewood actually flumed that yeaT was 
171,000 cords, and of lumber 33,300,000 feet. Ten 
and fifteen thousand dollars a mile has been spent to 
construct some of these flumes. 

It would seem at first thought that there could be 
but few other dependent industries besides those al- 
ready noted in this chapter, but the ramifications of 



DEPENDENT INDUSTRIES. 121 

the subject are almost endless. Tliere were the found- 
ries of Virginia City, the first one established in 1863, 
and soon followed by others, so that all repairs could 
be made for the mining machinery, and everything 
except the larger engines could be built. Soda, which 
was used extensively in the mills, was soon obtained 
from the desert. Copper ore, mined on Walker Eiver, 
Yv^as used to make sulphate of copper, or bluestone, 
of which the mills used a great deal. Marshy beds 
of borax, large deposits of alum, and black oxide of 
manganese were discovered and to some extent utilized 
as needed by the Comstock towns. 

Salt v/as freighted across the Sierras until pros- 
pectors developed many and extensive deposits. The 
first efforts to bring salt from beyond the forty-mile 
desert was remarkable on account of the animals used. 
The owners of the salt deposit sent to Asia and ob- 
tained in good condition nine Bactrian camels in the 
spring of 1861, and used them for a year or two. Each 
one carried about five hundred pounds, or twice as 
much as a pack mule did. They ate nearly every land 
of desert vegetation, particularly the harsh " grease- 
v^ood." On the other hand, they suffered greatly from 
the alkali, and their drivers despised and neglected 
them in every conceivable manner, so that the experi- 
ment never had a fair trial. In the end some of them 
died, some were used to carry ore in Arizona, and some 
escaped and have been reported at intervals by fright- 
ened cowboys or astonished tourists in the mountains 
of northern Arizona and 'New Mexico. 

Thus, as we have seen, the seemingly small and 
incidental elements in the life of a mining camp really 
occupy whole regiments of men. These dependent 
industries v/ere as much the creation of the Com- 
stock as the great hoisting works, the mills, or the 



122 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Sutro Tunnel. Destroy public confidence in the value 
of the mines^ and from that moment snows would 
drift unheeded over the mountain highways and ava- 
lanches would sweep them away to remain forever un- 
restored. Log-cabin stations would be abandoned, 
flumes would rot on the hillsides, and iron water pipes 
would rust. Orchards in the mountains would go un- 
pruned and grapes lie ungathered except by birds and 
raccoons. When the toiling miner tunnelled into some 
new deposit of rich ore, valleys and mountains were 
glad because of his good fortune. 



CHAPTEB XIII. 

MINING LITIGATION. 

It would be easy to moralize about the "general 
cnssedness " of all mining, particularly silver mining, 
"which is full of dips, spurs, and angles," and, like 
gambling, extremely uncertain. This remark applies 
with peculiar force to the Comstock camps. There, 
as Calvin would have said, the hand of Satan was daily 
manifest. ISTever since the world began were conflict- 
ing interests, honest and dishonest, more wildly en- 
tangled than in that early l^evada. 

The trouble began in the carelessness, or worse, 
of the prospectors of 1858 and 1859. I have alluded 
in a previous chapter to some of their meetings to de- 
clare laws respecting claims, and to the Gold Hill black- 
smith who kept his record book in a saloon where all 
and sundry could and did alter the entries. If prop- 
erly carried out, the district regulations might have 
done good service; but they were so sadly neglected 
that none of the early miners had what lawyers 
would call a title. Lord, in his history, cites the 
example of the original claim of 'Riley, ]\IcLaugh- 
lin, Penrod, and Comstock, now held by the Ophir and 
Consolidated Virginia and California companies. The 
four men put a stake on the line of the croppings fifty 
feet south of the place where the strike was made, and 
another one fifteen hundred feet north of the first stake. 
This gave one claim to each of tlie four, and one extra 
123 



124 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

claim for the discovery, wliicli was the custom at the 
time. They posted no notice (as the rides required), 
they recorded no notice either then or afterward (ex- 
pressly stated to be the most important evidence of 
ownership). Then came one James Cory, a chum of 
Comstock's, and asked for a share. Not receiving it, 
he posted a notice and claim^ed four hundred and fifty 
feet adjoining the claim of Comstock & Company. 
This was half as much again as he had a right to under 
the district laws. Big John Bishop and a miner named 
Camp told him that it was their ground, and the three 
finally divided but did not record the claims. Several 
other overlapping claims were made informally, and 
shortly aftervrard the miners discovered that upon 
one part of the lode, seven hundred and ten feet long, 
they had actually taken up and recorded fifteen hun- 
dred and fifty feet! Compromises and various read- 
justments followed, but so obscure and conflicting 
were the records and the " memory of v.^itnesses " that 
titles in this part of the Comstock have always been 
unsettled. 

There is a very strong reason in the nature of mines 
and miners for many of the delays in properly defin- 
ing a claim. Every part of a ledge is not equally rich. 
Ore occurs in " seams," ^^ chimneys," or " chutes," and 
as soon as a man " struck it rich " his first thought 
was usually to explore it until he could select and stake 
out the best three hundred feet. Nearly all of the 
early locators on the Comstock were trying to get the 
richest slice in the lode, and they kept away from the 
recorder's office; or if they entered a claim, they took 
care to leave it in such shape that it could be altered, 
like some of the Spanish land grants of California 
that were " floated " ten or fifteen miles, much to the 
subsequent profit of attorneys. 



MINING LITIGATION. 125 

Even when the "metes and bounds" were v/ell 
defined the guileless miners could not always he de- 
pended upon to leave them so. One of the pioneers 
mentions a mining suit in which the matter hinged 
upon the location of a stump that marked the corner. 
Judge and jury adjourned and went to look at the 
stump. It had been dug up bodily during the night 
and carried off, and the ground was so levelled that not 
the slightest clew remained. Each side accused the 
other, and the case was never decided. 

All the American mining camps have maintained 
in the case of quartz ledges the right to an inclined 
location — that is, the right to take a claim of definite 
size and follow it downward at any angle or angles, 
taking all the ore in the vein and in its legitimate 
branches. A miner, according to this idea, takes up 
a piece of ground simply for the lode, and goes wherever 
it goes. Spanish mining law, on the contrary, recog- 
nises only the square location. According to the Span- 
ish plan, as soon as a ledge passes beyond the boundary 
of a square piece of ground of given size it belongs 
to the man in whose tract it lies. One can easily see 
that the Spanish system must prevent much trouble 
and render the single-vein problem immaterial. In 
fact, it rules out of court nine tenths of all the cases 
that lead to lawsuits. Matters rapidly went from bad 
to worse on the Comstock until the most casual ob- 
server would have seen a wild Walpurgis-night revel 
of conflicting claims of every size, shape, and age tum- 
bling over each other three and four deep. It is hardly 
surprising, for the Comstock was not the only vein 
on the side of Mount Davidson, nor even the most 
prominent one. The Virginia lode was nearly parallel, 
and other veins, too many to name and hardly worth 
while digging up from the dust of forgotten records. 



126 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

crossed and recrossed the original Comstock until even 
ideally honest and painstaking miners, geologists, and 
courts would have found it impossible to straighten 
out the tangle that began when the first stake was 
driven at Gold Hill. When, as of course soon hap- 
pened, the miners became very much excited, when 
courts and lawyers were subjected to enormous tempta- 
tions, and when it was found that geologists and min- 
eralogists could not settle the question beforehand, 
the result is easy to sum up. Everywhere in the period 
of litigation there were almost inconceivable expenses, 
ruining the lesser mines, preventing dividends even 
where miners were worldng rich bodies of ore. Titles 
were clouded for years, and the finest legal intellects 
in America wrestled on the Comstock in cases that are 
still famous. 

Let us turn again to the genial Eoss Browne for a 
characteristic picture of the contentious miners. He 
says that when he entered Yirginia City by way of fitly- 
named Devirs Gate a fraction of the crowd " were en- 
gaged in a lawsuit relative to a question of title. The 
arguments used on both sides were empty whisky bot- 
tles, after the fashion of the Basilinum or club law 
which, according to Addison, prevailed in the colleges 
of learned men of former times. Several of the dis- 
putants had been already knocked down and convinced, 
and various others were freely shedding their blood 
in the cause." The Comstock ledge, Mr. Browne 
thought, was very fine, but it was held at a thousand 
dollars a running foot " when not even the great Com- 
stock himself could tell where it was running to." The 
whole region was in the midst of a free fight among 
the various claimants. The Comstock was " in a mess 
of confusion." Its shareholders had the most enlarged 
views, but those who had struck croppings around 



MINING LITIGATION. 127 

the Comstock were just as liberal in their ideas, so 
that, in brief, " everybody's spurs were running into 
everybody else's angles." The Cedar Hill Com- 
pany was spurring the Miller Company, the Virginia 
ledge was spurring the Continuation, the Don Com- 
pany was spurring the Billy Chollar, the Washoe 
was spurring everything else, and all these, the 
Comstock, and a dozen others, were interlocked 
spurs with spurs and angles with angles, like a Chinese 
puzzle. 

A study of the map of the United States Geological 
Survey, showing the locations at even a later date when 
many of the earlier claims had been consolidated out 
of existence, will convince any one that the preceding 
description of the Gordian knots left for the lawyers 
are only the merest glimpses of a state of things that 
should never have existed, and that cost the young 
mining communities of Nevada uncounted millions. 
Still the age of litigation, here as elsewhere, only proved 
the existence of a rich camp. Men do not fight " like 
grim death " for worthless ground. 

Contests in the courts began as soon as the promi- 
nent mines had cut far enough into the ore bodies to 
be ready to infringe upon each other's claims. The 
real geology of the district then became a pressing 
problem. Since the miners were determined to hold 
fast to the "inclined-location" method, the main 
problem was as follows: Were the quartz bodies nar- 
row veins separated by barren rock, or was all the vein 
matter deposited in one great irregular fissure, partly 
filled with wedges and masses of porphyry? Did the 
Comstock really consist of a single vein, or was it a 
multiple vein? Such were the questions that divided 
the miners into two hostile camps. What is now uni- 
versally recognised as a monster lode then seemed 



128 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

to consist of a niiinber of narrow, well-defined ledges, 
two of which were very prominent 

But to call the sj^stem a single lode was to entitle 
the first locators to divide among themselves nearly 
ever3d:hing along the hill slope and over the whole 
Comstock basin, and the rows of later locations, east 
and west, were annihilated at a blow. Even the Cali- 
fornians who had bonght out the original claimants 
of the Comstock did not dream of such wide-reach- 
ing ownersliip. Besides, the great majority were out- 
side, and naturally held to the popular many-ledge 
theory. A tew strongly organized and wealthy com- 
panies, holding what turned out to be the main ledge, 
ultimately decided to push the single-ledge theory, 
but at first all the evidence was dead against them. 

Since the Comstock near the surface dipped toward 
the west, it separated more and more from the line of 
claims on the east, and the first conflict vras therefore 
with the nearest line of claims on the west. The small 
ledges here seemed very rich and v^ere perpendicular, or 
nearly so. Thus the sloping shafts of the Ophir, Mexi- 
can, and other mines soon came in contact with the ver- 
tical shafts on vrhat was termed the " middle lead." The 
result was the case of Ophir versus McCall, which came 
up in Genoa, September 3, 1860, before Judge Cradle- 
baugh in the loft of a livery stable. Several hundred 
armed men sat behind the respective parties to the suit. 
One witness was shot at a number of times as he rode 
down the ra\dne at night. Although the famous Wil- 
liam M. Stewart — rugged, masterful, full of vitality, 
already recognised as the coming king of the Com- 
stock — was attorney for the Ophir, he could only 
force a disagreement of the jury. 

Mining cases accumulated steadily until Judge Mott 
opened the First District Court in February, 1862. 



MINING LITIGATION. 129 

By that time every valuable claim in the region was a 
" fighting claim " — that is, it was deeply and violently 
in litigation. Suits to dispossess claimants, suits to 
prove trespass, perjury, or fraud, single-ledge suits and 
multiple-ledge suits — these were as thick as blackber- 
ries. Wrote a correspondent of the San Francisco 
Bulletin: "We shall never outgrow this perpetual 
litigation until the courts rule that all indefinite or 
floating claims are worthless. If you find anything 
worth having, some one will levy blackmail." 

Fights between rival claimants were frequent and 
bloody. Sometimes such fights took place "at the 
front" — that is, at the end of a drift. If there was 
reason to believe that a rival company was working 
on disputed ground, the superintendent of the first 
company took steps to drive them away either by smok- 
ing them out with sulphur or other substances, or by 
running a drift into the place and sending a body of 
miners with picks and shovels to overpower the enemy. 
"Fighting men" were hired at ten dollars a day in 
some cases, armed with knives and pistols, and sent to 
disputed territory. In fact, while cases were being 
argued in the courts, miners were sometimes fighting 
underground. The men of the Keystone Company 
drove away the miners of the Peerless, took possession 
of their shaft, and filled it with waste rock. The Grass 
Valley miners were assaulted through a drift by men 
of the Bajazette and Golden Era and driven to the sur- 
face. The Uncle Sam boys drove out the Ccntreville 
men in a similar manner. Yellow Jacket sappers cut 
into the Gentry shaft and smoked out their rivals. The 
Gentrys countermined and blew " all sorts of stinking 
smudges " into Yellow Jacket until the people of Vir- 
ginia protested against the unendurable odours that 
filled every house in the city. 



130 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

One of the most famous suits of the period was 
brought by the heirs and old-time backers of the Grosh 
brothers, who, it will be remembered, had been pros- 
pecting for silver and had organized several companies 
before the Gold Hill discover}^ The shareholders in 
these forgotten enterprises now formed the " Grosh 
Gold and Silver Mining Company ^^ and claimed 3,750 
feet in the best part of the Comstock. Capitalized at 
$5,000,000, and afterward at $10,000,000, they soon 
sold enough stock to make a long and brilliant fight. 
The Nevada newspapers, like Silas Wegg, "dropped 
into rhyme '' such as the following: 

The Ophir on the Comstock 

Was rich as bread and honey ; 
The Gould and Curry, farther south, 

Was raking out the money ; 
The Savage and the others 

Had machinery all complete, 
When in came the Groshes 

And nipped all our feet. 

After long and costly litigation the heirs of the 
Grosh brothers failed to secure any foothold, and so 
dropped into oblivion. 

Another most di£B.cult, protracted, and expensive 
mining suit was between the famous Billy Chollar and 
the Potosi (pronounced by old Comstock Potosee). The 
Chollar Company, after a long series of minor difficul- 
ties with the adjoining claim (Potosi), claimed that 
theirs was the original ledge, and brought suit to " re- 
cover possession of a surface claim four hundred feet 
wide and fourteen hundred feet long," including, of 
course, a large part of the Comstock lode with the in- 
evitable "dips, spurs, and angles." The companies 
fairly locked horns over this difficulty in 1861, and 



\^ 



J 






I 




^'Sk' «▼! 



On the Way to the Miuo. 



MINING LITIGATION. 131 

spent about a million and a half before they concluded 
to unite their shattered fortunes in the great Chollar- 
Potosi. 

"When this suit was brought. Judge Mott, who was 
on the bench of the First Territorial District, favoured 
the Chollar side in their geological theory that the 
Comstock was only an offshoot from their vein. Mott, 
to quote from Bancroft, " was therefore bribed or wor- 
ried into resigning." The new incumbent, Judge 
North, finally decided in favour of the Potosi crowd. 
North was soon afterward forced to resign *^ to avoid 
the scandal of which he was the subject." Chief- 
Justice Turner was persuaded to follow his example, 
and finally the members of the bar asked the one re- 
maining judge to resign, which he did. Both sides had 
received conflicting decisions in the course of this piti- 
able affair, but neither side, as it turned out, felt will- 
ing to have their methods of conducting litigation made 
public, and so, as I have said, the companies consoli- 
dated. 

The great fight, however, unique in many respects 
among mining suits, was that instituted at a very early 
date by Burning Moscow against Ophir. The new 
company, under the title of " Burning Mo sea Ledge 
Lucky Co.," claimed, in April, 1860, 2,400 feet " west 
of Virginia City, between the Central and Virginia 
ledges." Their ledge was said to be distinct from that 
of the Ophir, and to be *^ twenty-three feet wide in 
good ore." The stock was "boomed" in San Fran- 
cisco, and soon the company had the sinews of war 
and came to the front in support of the favourite many- 
ledge theory as against the belief that ledges a mile 
away sprang from the roots of the Comstock and would 
eventually fall into the hands of the " only original 
Jacobs," the first line of locators. 
10 



132 THE STOr.Y OF THE MINE. 

Burning Moscow made an assault with terrible 
effect. All tlie wheels of the courts were set in motion. 
Ophir began buying out interests in other claims on 
the rival lode. The Garrison Company also brought 
suit against Ophir; the Whitbeck Company did the 
same, and the McCall Company followed, until Ophir 
purchased all their claims, which were on three so- 
called ledges lying within fifteen hundred feet of each 
other. Old Virginia made his last public appearance 
in connection mth these Ophir purchases. Some of 
the claims they secured depended upon the original 
notice of location. Finney would not or could not find 
it until the superintendent of Ophir persuaded him 
into a tunnel and locked an iron gate upon him. In 
the morning he v/as sober and willing to produce the 
notice. He went to the disputed ledge, pried oif a 
weather-beaten slab, and found a yellow paper, the 
original location notice that he had put there in 1858. 

Burning Moscow, whose location was disputed in 
a similar manner by claims on sub-ledges, consolidated 
about this time with its several tormentors, increased 
its capital stock from half a million to three million 
dollars, and returned with multiplied energy to the 
assault upon Ophir. California and ISTevada courts 
were shaken by the tumult of the struggle. The first 
onslaught of the Moscow supporters had lasted for two 
years, and the second lasted quite as long. The pioneer 
Comstockers were again and again questioned and 
cross-questioned, until the little that they knew was 
inextricably confused with the host of mining romances 
of the period. Some of them fairly lived on witness 
fees. The district record book was made to uphold 
each theory by turn. ^leanwhile the real question 
in dispute could not be determined except by actual 
exploration. 



MINING LITIGATION. 133 

Gradually this view of the case began to prevail. 
The community felt that the development of the dis- 
trict was fatally handicapped by such gigantic litiga- 
tion. Suddenly Burning Moscow discovered that what- 
ever might be at the bottom of their ledge, the top was 
chiefly lead and base metal. It was no Comstock, but 
contained only a very low-grade ore that could not be 
milled at a profit after a few surface stringers v/ere 
mined out. Burning-Moscow stock fell from four hun- 
dred dollars to five dollars a foot, and Ophir bought the 
disputed property. First and last, the direct expenses 
of the fight had been more than a million dollars. 

The mining suits which have been briefly described 
were only a few out of a great multitude. In 1863 
some thirty cases, involving property valued at fifty 
million dollars, were in the district courts. " We had 
to fight fire with fire in those days,'^ said an old Cali- 
fornian. Men who saw their whole fortunes at stake 
were not always scrupulous about ways and means, 
and their active agents were less often so. The atmos- 
phere in which these interminable litigations were car- 
ried on became heavier and blacker every year. Pub- 
lic confidence in witnesses, juries, attorneys, and judges 
was sorely shaken. The Attorney-General of Nevada in 
one of his State reports, referring to the period under 
consideration, said: *^ Chicanery won more suits than 
eloquence and learning, and corruption more than solid 
merit.'' Nine tenths of the voting population of Storey 
County once signed a petition asking all the judges to 
resign. 

Nevada's peculiar pre-eminence in the matter of 
litigation from 1860 to the end of 1865 is clearly ex- 
hibited by the Court records for that period. Ophir 
was in thirty-seven suits, in twenty-eight of which 
she was plaintiff. Yellow Jacket came next, with 



134 THE STORY OF THE MIXE. 

thirty-two suits, "being plaintiff in twenty-four. Sav- 
age was nearly as litigious, haying had twenty-nine 
suits and acting as plaintiff in twenty-two. Gould 
and Curry comes next, with twenty-seyen suits, twenty 
of which were " actions brought.'^ Oyerman had 
twenty-three suits. Eight more of the leading Corn- 
stock mines of the period under consideration (not 
including Consolidated Virginia, California, or the later 
combinations) had from nine to seyenteen suits apiece. 
The total for twelve mines is two hundred and forty- 
five lawsuits, in seventy-seven of which the companies 
named were defendants and in one hundred and sixty- 
eight of which they were plaintiffs. In other words, 
more than two thirds of the suits were to dispossess 
the claimants of ground the plaintiffs considered as 
belonging to the Comstock lode under the single-ledge 
theory. The direct cost of all this litigation was ten 
million dollars — one fifth of the entire product of the 
Comstock during that period. What an illustration of 
the wasteful yet magnificent energy of the early Com- 
stockers is the fact that this heart-breaking litigation 
began almost as soon as the discovery of silver was made, 
and rose to its greatest developments at the same time 
with the gigantic mechanical achievements and the 
vast underground works of the epoch! Five of those 
Xevada years were the equivalent of half a century 
of every-day life and of ordinary enterprises. 

Great were the legal intellects that were at the dis- 
posal of the mining hosts fighting so steadily for con- 
trol of what began to be called on the Pacific coast the 
" Treasure-house of the World." Some of the famous 
cases were tried in San Francisco, where the leading 
companies soon had their places of business; but Vir- 
ginia City and (after the admission of !N'evada in 1864) 
Carson, the State capital, were the principal battle 



MINING LITIGATION. 135 

grounds. The leading Comstock lawyers became fa- 
mous throughout the United States. Young attorneys 
trained on the Comstock followed the prospector, the 
miner, the mill owner, and the freighter to camp after 
camp in the desert and the high Eockies till the prin- 
ciples of American mining law were expounded in 
Dead-Sea hollows below the ocean level, and in clusters 
of pioneer cabins above the clouds, ten thousand feet 
higher than the ocean floor, in the Alps of Colorado. 
William M. Stewart, the " old invincible,^^ tireless in 
devotion, incapable of fatigue, master of mining-camp 
juries, received from Belcher $165,000 and from Yellow 
Jacket $30,000 as single fees. His professional income 
during the years of litigation was $200,000 a year. 
General Thomas H. Williams made four million dollars 
from mining property deeded to him as fees for his 
legal services. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 

In these days nine men out of ten know sometliing 
about mining stocks and methods of dealing in them. 
At the time of the discovery of the Comstock there 
was no such thing on the Pacific coast as a stock and 
exchange board where shares in mines or companies 
could be listed and transferred. But the people of the 
entire Pacific coast were highly prosperous and ready 
for speculative investment. There were few manu- 
factures, so that real estate and mines offered alm^ost 
the only opportunities. The invention of methods by 
which the dollars of the servant girl and the farm 
labourer could be iised to speculate with suited all 
classes alike. Assessments furnished the impetus that 
carried the Comstock mines safely over periods of de- 
pression. 

Men were trading and selling not shares, but feet 
and inches, on the various ledges of the Comstock 
group all through the eventful summer of 1859. The 
first trouble was that no one had any cash, excepting 
a few newly arrived Cahfornians. The second trouble 
was that nothing was developed sufiiciently to show 
other than a speculative value, even on the main Com- 
stock lode. Buying such property seemed to cautious 
men the wildest of gambles, even at absurdly low prices. 
Prospectors and speculators were staldng out the coun- 
try for miles around. There were times when, if quartz 
136 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 137 

ledges could be supposed to take a personal interest 
in their fortunes, the Comstock would have been seen 
to stand abashed, flushing with indignation at the way 
in which its sworn lovers were flirting with base-metal 
outcroppings in the sage brush and deserts. 

One will fail to appreciate the completeness with 
which the Pacific coast became in a day captive to sil- 
ver unless he accepts the great rush to Washoe as mere- 
ly the outward and visible symbol of things spiritual 
and intellectual. Men, women, and children yielded 
gladly to the spell — the story of another Peru, and 
the eager silver hunters were met on the summits of 
the Sierras by ragged, hungry, but desperately happy 
prospectors who told them that Washoe was richer 
than their dreams had pictured it, and who offered 
them mining feet in claims here, there, and everywhere 
for a few dollars. 

" The truth is," they whispered to the incoming 
Calif ornians — " the truth is that I am dead broke, but 
I have a fortune sufficient for any man in even the poor- 
est of these claims which I have taken up or traded for. 
Five feet is enough to make a man rich, and if you can 
not take more, take five feet, it makes no difference 
where, at ten dollars a foot." Then they showed speci- 
mens so rich, black, and heavy that the Californians 
held their breath with envy, and, whether they bought 
or not, hastened on with redoubled energies. There 
was something wonderfully childlike and confiding 
about the bargains and transfers often made after pre- 
cisely this manner in the Sierra passes between entire 
strangers. 

In a few months the professional speculator, ^' the 
man who worked claims with his jaw instead of his 
pick" (to quote a common Washoe sentiment), was 
to be seen everywhere. Such men ^'huddled about 



138 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

comers of Virginia City consulting in low tones about 
various claims " ; they straggled in from the Flowery 
diggings or other supposedly rich places with speci- 
mens in their hands, " offering bargains/^ as Eoss 
Browne writes, " in the Eogers, the Lady Bryant, the 
Mammoth, the Woolly Horse, and Heayen knows how 
many other valuable leads, at prices varying from ten 
to seventy-five dollars a foot." The old, old games, 
as ancient as human capacity for swindling and being 
swindled, were everywhere in full operation, though 
no one as yet called the process " dealing in stocks." 
They were " bucking and bearing " (the term " bull " 
was not then known on the Comstock). They were 
" trading claims." They were " stuffing each other " 
after every conceivable manner and diligently blowing 
" Washoe bubbles." Mad speculation was everywhere, 
but no money was to be seen except in gambling rooms 
and saloons. Silver was ever3rwhere underground, if 
reports could be credited; lawsuits, deeds, mortgages, 
and agreements to transfer everything on top of the 
earth or within it were as thick as autumn leaves and 
hardly as durable. Everybody was a billionaire in 
silver-claim inches, feet, yards, and rods, "including 
dips, spurs, and angles," from the top of Mount David- 
son to the bottom of — Devil's Gate. 

Eoss Browne, whose genius caught many a glimpse 
in the rapidly turning kaleidoscope of the Comstock, 
remains our best guide through the " horrible confusion 
of tongues," the crowds of roaring, raving drunkards, 
" swilling fiery liquids from morning to night " ; the 
" flaring and flaunting gambling saloons " ; the " tor- 
rents of imprecations " ; the feverish, unhallowed 
thirst for gain; the crowds of crazy-looldng wretches 
running hither and thither, hurrying to assay offices, 
pulling out papers, exchanging mysterious signals — 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 139 

these Washoe millionaires with their oiitcroppings and 
indications from the " Wake-Up Jake," " Eoot Hog or 
Die/' " Wild Cat/' " Dry-Up/' ' Grizzly-Hill/' " Same- 
Horse/' " Let-Her-Eip/' "Yon-Bet/' " Gonge-Eye/' 
and other famous ledges and companies. All night long, 
as Browne elsewhere reports, these fiendish noises con- 
tended, and his ears were overwhelmed with unintelli- 
gible jargonings and the difficult slang of the new min- 
ing camp. He tried one night to sleep at " Zip's/' 
where twenty bunks were in the room, and found that 
every inmate except himself was bent on passing the 
entire night trading and transferring claims in the 
midst of shouting and universal pandemonium. He 
and the late Henry De Groot fled for refuge to a hole 
in the hillside and v/rote letters to the New York Times 
and the San Francisco Bulletin describing in most real- 
istic language the strange scenes about them. 

What most surprised and often shocked the visitor 
w^as the fact that all this turmoil, this restless con- 
course of amateur stockbrokers and new-fledged specu- 
lators whose ranks increased daily, this howling and 
perennial insanity, occurred in a frontier camp in the 
midst of noble mountains where only a short time 
before the profound peace of an untroubled wilder- 
ness had reigned supreme. One writer suggested that 
if the ISTew York Stock Exchange should hold its meet- 
ings on the top of Mount Eigi the scene Avould be paral- 
leled, but in many respects it was a situation that was 
entirely new to the history of speculation in America, 
and the strangely mingled Comstock crovrd of 1860 
was certainly more wildly picturesque on the windy 
flank of Mount Davidson than even the most turbulent 
of well-dressed IsTew York brokers and speculators. As 
they swayed through alleys between flapping canvas 
tents they seemed the chattering, half-dazed, wild- 



140 THE STOPwY OF THE MINE. 

eyed survivors of all nations and races thrown shattered 
and homeless into the desert after some vast world 
catastrophe that had erased from existence ever}i:hing 
except the wealth passion and the ledges of AYashoe. 

But prices of mining claims could not rise forever. 
With drastic sarcasm an " old resident of Washoe/' 
who is supposed to have been the late J. W. Simon- 
ton, one of the owners of the San Trancisco Bulletin, 
described the situation in May, 1860: "We are in- 
formed that there is a panic in San Francisco in rela- 
tion to our mining stocks; that nothing will sell; that 
even Ophir, Washoe, Chollar, and Corsair are drugs 
in the market; that banks won't discount Washoe specu- 
lators' paper; that Lady Bryan sells for fifteen dollars 
and Rogers for forty dollars; that the bottom has fallen 
out. Two months ago,'' he continues, "these wise 
men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl and got badly 
wet. Two months ago ever}i:hing would sell. People 
bought blindly in the Bob Eidley, Last Chance, and 
Bob-Tail Xag. Where they were located, what was 
the character of the rock, who were the locators, and 
what the title, were not matters of inquiry. Pools at 
your end of the telegraph were deceived by Imaves at 
our end; we sent to you mysterious hints of new discov- 
eries that never existed, strikes in mines never located, 
accounts of sales that never took place. Your prudent 
men who would not buy a foot of land in San Fran- 
cisco or make a loan without careful search of title have 
risked thousands without a thought. Your greedy 
folly was taken advantage of by our avarice; you be- 
came the victims of your own sublime stupidity and 
dishonesty." 

A conservative estimate made in 1860 placed the 
number of claims located, interests in which were in 
most cases on the market, as five thousand within a 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 141 

radius of thirty miles from Virginia City! Only three 
hundred of these claims were ever opened at all, and 
only twenty were considered by careful outsiders as 
"thoroughly well established mines." Time was to 
show that only eight or nine of the twenty which were 
considered absolutely certain investments vv^ere to pay 
dividends. The majority of these five thousand claims 
lay forever idle. One would not have known that they 
were called mines except for an occasional claim stake 
or a fluttering, badly spelled notice on " indications " 
which were seldom attractive to competent mineralo- 
gists. Iron pyrites and all sorts of worthless metals 
were as good as gold and silver to the enterprising ad- 
venturers. Gopher, squirrel, and coyote holes fur- 
nished indications on the strength of which claims 
were laid out. Ignorant and plausible speculators 
with a smattering of geology added to the confusion. 
Before long men were claiming to have ledges of irid- 
ium, platinum, plumbago, and various other valu- 
able substances. One Washoe prospector being in- 
formed by a San Francisco man that he wanted an 
ambergris mine, replied that he had one already staked 
out and for sale. A group of men under direction of 
the " spirits '^ tunnelled for weeks into the granite of 
Mount Davidson in order to tap an alleged lake of 
coal oil. 

Besides the five thousand actual claims there were 
many more prospect holes a few feet across — mere 
ragged pits or cuts in the yellow sand, clay, or rocks 
of the barren hillsides. Prospect holes, too, were about 
all that one could see on the vast majority of claims 
already held. They dotted the whole region in wind- 
blown heaps and hollows between dismal clumps of 
sage brush and the dull yellow of coarse sunflowers 
that occasionally bloomed in the freshly broken slopes. 



142 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

This was the sort of thing, for the most part, that the 
staid old merchants of San Francisco and Sacramento 
had been fighting over in the spring of 1860! Vir- 
ginia City and Gold Hill record books show that nearly 
sixteen thousand claims were recorded in those dis- 
tricts in the twenty years after 1859. 

Donald Davidson, the first ore buyer on the Corn- 
stock, was soon introduced to one of the favourite jokes 
of the fun-loving miners who were quite well aware 
of the innate absurdity of claim-staking the whole of 
I^evada. After he had agreed to buy two hundred 
tons of selected Ophir ore at two hundred dollars a ton 
and to ship it at his own expense per Carson mule fast- 
freight train, the miners celebrated the important 
event by a trip to the top of " Sun Peak," which then 
and there was rebaptized Mount Davidson. They 
showed the honest old Scotchman dozens of quartz 
veins on the way up, and told him they were fairly run- 
ning over with richness. After their return in the 
evening they proposed to locate claims on these new 
ledges for the banker and all his personal friends. The 
recorder was called in, and Davidson gladly put up 
fifty cents apiece for some twenty-five claims in the 
granite masses of the grand old mountain. Then the 
jovial recorder suddenly invited the crowd to aid him 
in the liquid transm.utation of some of the Davidsonian 
gold. 

Throughout the entire period of stock speculation, 
in all its ebbs and flows here and elsewhere as well, 
every student is surprised at the fewness of the paying 
mines and at the number that hang helplessly upon 
reputations made for the various districts by one or two 
magnificent properties in each. The bullion reports 
from these stir the pulses of investors and speculators 
alike, and they often pour successive assessments into 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 143 

worthless and barren places for years. The sum total of 
the dead-work of the Comstock period is almost incalcu- 
lable. Men of large capital and the millions with their 
small savings nnited to explore the ledges of Nevada 
at an enormous expense, and often upon entirely un- 
profitable mines, or rather not — mines. To individual- 
ize these cases of profligate outlay, writes one of the 
old Virginia City editors, '^^ would be simply to cata- 
logue the leading enterprises carried on during this 
epoch of prodigality and mistake." Ten million dol- 
lars was spent in sinking shafts and running drifts 
about Virginia City without finding a single large and 
lucrative mine. 

There are the forgotten Palmyra and Indian Spring 
districts in Pine Nut Eange where two pretty little 
towns once stood, but now only the graveyards remain. 
There is that Nevadan Golgotha of speculators, Es- 
meralda, where millions of dollars were wasted. Be- 
yond, toward the Humboldt, in range after range of 
bleak, desolate mountains, or in the tawny desert, arc 
the ruins of abortive mining enterprises. In every 
direction — east, west, north, south — credulous stock- 
holders staked and lost vast sums of money before the 
close of the '60's. Over in the lava of Pine Woods dis- 
trict in 1863 some Virginia City men sold a group of 
mythical mines and received a very large pa3mient 
down. The New York buyers spent another fortune 
and departed, leaving the holes in the desert. Every- 
where, for hundred of miles, on steep ranges, in sandy 
wastes, money was spent without stint upon misguided 
and foolish mining enterprises, supported almost al- 
ways by associations and companies. Said Dr. De 
Groot, who had visited nearly every camp on the Pacific 
coast, "That's the dilapidated mill of the Lct-Hcr-Eip" 
— and, true to its name, it burst the financial intcgu- 



144: TRE 570?lY 



r xniL 



neiLZs ci everr stocldiolder. " I haven't time,'^ he con- 
tinues, *■ lo relate the story of the ' Wild Emigrant/ 
the 'Shamrock/ the 'Silver Lyre/ the 'Pungle- 
Down/ " and he makes passing mention of many other 
wildcats and abandoned districts of the "GO's, snch as 
the ** Ltm.ar Bainbow/' the " Bloody Thtmder.*' and the 
cotmtless host of nnprodnctive mines in Cortez, Silver 
Bend. Beveille, Pahranagat, and classic White Prae. 

Later came others, draggiag Inckless speculators 
doTm the paths of ruin — barren Panamint, on the edge 
of the terrible Death Yalley; Marietta, in the Excelsior 
Monntains, where the whole deserted town still lies 
bleaching in the sun; emptied, ghostly camps by the 
score, dead, tmburied, weighted down by human cnrses. 
Each one of them was hailed in its day as a new and 
greater Comstock: each one in its fall destroyed homes 
and made suicides. The smallest and most ephemeral 
of them all has had a history which, had it occurred in 
some staid farming commtinity, would have made the 
place memorable as the scene of an awful disaster. But, 
spread widely over time and space, the ruin that fol- 
lows the failure of a promisLog camp is difficult to trace 
or measure, especially in these lesser instances. The 
Amazonian current of Comstoci: speculation sweeps far 
out into the ocean of human life, strewn with its multi- 
tudinous social wrecks, and it still remains the pre- 
eminent type of its class. 

As time passed, mining stocks became more and 
more the typical and most popular form of speculation 
in Cahfomia and Xevada; often the whole community 
seemed to be dealing in them. There have been periods 
when leading brands of goods have been named after 
favourite mines, when streets, square, parks, and chil- 
dren were christened in the same way, and when the 
slang of the mining market was used bv everv class of 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. I45 

society and in every learned profession. The bar- 
keeper mixed ^^ bonanza" drinks and talked of his 
stocks. Boys and girls, servants, labourers, mechanics, 
and clerks were calculating upon gaining fortunes with 
their little savings. All classes alike helped to sustain 
the stupendous game of silver mining in Nevada. 
" The market," said the Mining Eeviev/ in 1870, " ex- 
tends everywhere; the buyers and sellers of stock in- 
clude the millionaire and the mendicant, the modest 
matron and the brazen courtesan, the prudent man of 
business and the gambler, the maidservant and her 
mistress, the banker and his customer." 

The whole history of the Comstock lode is revealed 
in the assessments, dividends, and fluctuations of the 
stocks of the separate mines. There every consolida- 
tion of interests, every lawsuit, every period of ex- 
travagance and of economy is written so that he who 
runs may read. Before the end of 1861 eighty-six com- 
panies were organized and working the Comstock and 
adjacent mines; their aggregate capital was $61,500,- 
000. Only a fev/ were paying at the time, but every 
one fondly believed that they would all wheel into line 
before long. The prodigality that followed in the days 
of the earlier bonanzas was partly the free-handed lib- 
erality of Californians trained in the schools of the 
placer camps, and partly the unchecked extravagance 
of gambling stockholders. Gould and Curry, a mar- 
vellously rich mine, took out nearly nine million dol- 
lars and declared $2,908,800 in dividends during 1863 
and 1864. The actual investments made by its owners, 
who bought it for a few thousand dollars, had been 
less than $200,000; but the expenses of the company 
during that two years was close upon six million dol- 
lars, or more than twice the dividends. It has been 
reckoned that the dividends from the nearly 110,000 



146 ' THE STOKY OF THE MIKE. 

tons of ore milled during tliose two years niiglit just 
as well have been four and a half millions^, as less than 
three millions, if the company had worked all its ores 
in its own mills and with less haste. But, as the presi- 
dent of Gould and Curry said, ^" every stockholder 
vranted it snaked out at once, at any cost, and so we 
wasted a third of our profits." 

The first great depression in mining stocks (after 
they had any commercial value at all) began as soon 
as the rich ore chutes near the surface had been worked 
out and the search for new deposits had begun, with 
consequent assessments. Shares rained on the market 
from all directions, and hundreds of prominent men 
were ruined. Gould and Curry, which in 1863 sold 
at $6,300 a square foot, fell to $900 in 1864. Ophir 
dropped from $1,580 to $300. Savage went down 
from $2,600 to $750. Every mine on the Comstock 
suffered in a similar proportion, and the " wildcats " 
of the outside districts were " out of sight, under- 
ground." 

While the leading mines were drifting for more 
silver along the east wall, some directors, who desired 
to keep the news of any " find " from reaching the ears 
of the public, conceived the idea of confining miners 
to the mine for days at a time. They received the best 
of care and often had increased wages. In 1868 Hale 
& Norcross tried the experiment. When the men were 
released the superintendent reported a strike, and the 
stock rose from $1,300 to $2,200, though the mine did 
not justify the increase. Speculators soon became so 
suspicious of the plan that the stocks of a mine were 
quite as apt to fall as to rise when the miners were im- 
prisoned. 

According to the present plan, when a mine reaches 
rich pay-ore the superintendent, who has long watched 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 147 

tlie process of the work, generally knows it first. The 
doors of the building over the mine are closed and 
admittance is refused to all outsiders, even to reporters. 
Only a few of the men in the mine have had a chance 
to find out anything, because, if the superintendent 
knows his business, a " secret shift " has done all the 
work for weeks at the advanced point in the drifts 
where ore is expected. The oldest and most reliable 
miners are chosen for the shift. They are seldom 
ordered in set terms to hold their tongues, but if any- 
thing regarding the mine gets abroad every man on 
the shift is discharged. The truth about the inside 
of a mine can seldom be obtained from a miner that 
works there. Loyalty is ingrained in the very nature of 
the man. Though nearly every miner buys stock, and 
it would be strange if he did not, he is up to all the 
points of the game, and if he is on a " secret shift " can 
manage to conceal his information from the shrewdest 
of " curbstones brokers ^' or mining spies. 

Virginia City in times of stock excitement was 
honeycombed with newspaper reporters, agents of deal- 
ers, and outsiders whose business it was to obtain by 
fair means or foul an exact knowledge of the condition, 
present and prospective, of the Comstock mines. Every 
one who was connected with the suspected mine or 
mines was shadowed as closely as if he was a counter- 
feiter. A Comstock tradition is to the effect that on 
one occasion when the air was full of hints of a strike, 
but nothing could be gleaned in any direction, a shrewd 
mining detective hid in the works, saw the superin- 
tendent come out and take off his dirty mining clothes. 
He slipped in, and finally managed to scrape a few 
ounces of dust and clay from boots and overalls. This 
waste, when assayed, showed that some drift the super- 
intendent had been examining was in a new and very 
11 



148 THE STOHY OF THE MINE. 

ricli formation. He wired bis backers to '^ buy bard/*' 
and they made vast profits. 

During every great stock excitement tbe mining 
towns themselves are loud-biizzing beehives^ sending 
out the latest news, buying and selhng stocks with 
feverish haste. In Virginia City as well as in San 
Francisco at snch seasons fortunes have been made and 
lost in an hour. It is curious to see how people behave 
when stocks start upward again. Those who lost in 
the pre"vdous spurts remark calmly to their friends: 
" l^ow this time I shall sell at a fair profit; let the other 
fellow make somthing too.'' Pretty soon stocks jump 
a little higher. " 'Now when I can double my money, 
off I go for a vacation." Then stocks fall off a few 
points, *^'get soft/' then harden, then "run again 
softer."' " fSome one has been telegraphing lies about 
the mine to San Francisco," says our friend. But mat- 
ters grow worse, the holders are called upon to make 
good their bargains, and the boom ends in a crash, with 
our luckless friend still holding his shares. 

In Dan De Quille's Big Bonanza is a letter said to 
have been received in Virginia City from a Frenchman 
who had become acquainted with the meaning of the 
term "mud," and I quote a portion: " By zee advice 
of our goot friend," as the inquirer stated, "I have 
procured some time past on what you call * on zee time ' 
many shares of zee Bobtaile. He, mine friend who 
repose on zee inside, express liimself of zee mine wis 
moche enthusiasme. Zee mine be one merveille de la 
nature; zee works un chef-d'oeuvre de I'art. But now, 
pretty soon — ^le diable! Zee brokaire man use zee ex- 
pression to me as follovrs: ' more mud.' So many, five, 
seex time have he, zee brokaire, desire of me some leetle 
more mud that now I mus make one gran sacrifice 
pecuniare. It be now becomxC scandaleusc. Pretty 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 149 

soon you have one crash financial — I gone bust — ^me. 
I be ver moche perplex wis zee stroke of prices. He 
viggle up, he viggle down, all zee time. Will you have 
ze complaisance to inform me how soon he will viggle 
high up, an remain to pass some time up dare ? '^ 

In order to illustrate more forcibly the fluctuations 
of the stock market during the ten years following 
1867, I have gathered the following notes upon two 
typical mines from the commercial columns of the San 
Francisco newspapers: 

Alpha, an assessment mine, sold for $1,570 in 
February, 1868, fell to $33 in September, rose to $62 
in February, 1869, sank to $11 in October, rose to $21 
in March, 1870, sank to $3 in September, rose to $20 
in September, 1871, and to $240 in April, 1872, then 
sank to $15 in July, 1873, and rose again to $100 in 
September; in February, 1874, sank to $9, rose to $45 
in June, 1875, and sank to $3 the same month; in 
May, 1876, it rose to $67, and sank in December to 
$18; in 1877 it fluctuated between $5 and $23. Alpha, 
with 30,000 shares, levied $330,000 in assessments up 
to 1880, and has never declared a dividend. 

Belcher, unlike Alpha, was a great dividend pro- 
ducer, one of the three leading mines of the period, 
having paid in thirty-eight dividends up to 1880 nearly 
sixteen million dollars, with assessments of less than 
two millions. It had 104,000 shares after 1869 (1,100 
to the foot). The price of the stock sank from $430 
in April, 1868, to $110 in July. Then, the capital 
stock being largely increased, the price per share be- 
came proportionately less. In 1869 prices ranged from 
$12 to $35; in 1870 sank from $35 to $1; rose to $6 
in January, 1871, and to $450 in December; sank to 
$6 in January, 1872, rose again to $1,525 in April, 
fluctuating all that summer, dovrn to $1.50, up to $95, 



150 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

do\ni to $9, and so on. In 1873 there were again great 
variations; the stock sold down to 25 cents a share and 
up to $113 with many surprising eddies, going down to 
$1.50 in August, and then rallying until in January, 
1874, it was at $120, brealdng by E'ovember to $42. 

It would be easy to go on with these comparisons 
from which an instructive chart might be constructed to 
exhibit the rise and fall of stock values. For the pur- 
poses of speculation, the mines that did not pay any 
dividends were often exactly as good as those that did 
pay. This was fortunate for the stock owners and for 
the miners, mill men, superintendents, and all who 
made a living from the business, either directly or in- 
directly. Out of one hundred and three Washoe min- 
ing companies reported and regularly listed, only four- 
teen paid any dividends at all, and only six of these 
paid more dividends than assessments. The six were 
Consolidated Virginia, California, Belcher, Crown 
Point, Gould and Curry, and Kentuck. 

Some of the assessments paid upon mines that 
never yielded a profit and paid unflinchingly for years 
by successive legions of stockholders were unparalleled 
in mining history. Alta put in $1,317,600; Baltimore 
Consolidated, $1,015,000; Bullion, $3,352,000; Cale- 
donia, $1,935,000; Consolidated Imperial, $1,125,000; 
Justice, $3,230,000; Mexican, $1,243,000; New York, 
$900,000; Overman, $3,162,800; Silver Hill, $1,620,- 
000; TJtah, $1,030,000. Here were ten mines that 
sank in assessment work nearly seventeen million dol- 
lars, while many other mines that paid some dividends 
lost very large sums: in the case of Yellow Jacket, 
$2,454,000; and of Sierra :N'evada, $3,747,500. Hun- 
dreds of thousands of investors in every part of the civi- 
lized world have reason to remember one or another 
of this list of non-producers. 




Sectional View; 




le Belcher Mine. 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 151 

It has been estimated by many writers that if the 
highest price be taken which each mine at one time 
or another has brought (as figured out from the number 
of shares and the stock-board maximum) the Comstock 
has cost $700,000,000, but there never was a single 
time when the entire lode, even in the stock market, 
was being sold at this valuation. The only possible 
way of estimating the profits of a mining enterprise 
is to take the difference between the total yield and the 
total expense. The currents, undertows, eddies, whirl- 
pools, and enormous maelstroms of the mining-stock 
markets are of oceanic vastness, crowded with unfore- 
seen perils, and throbbing with immeasurable energies, 
expressed all too feebly in billion-dollar estimates, 
but the actual available capital of the stock market 
is many times less than its fictitious valuation. If 
it were not so there could never be any stock market 
at all. 

In the year 1877 the total sales of mining shares 
on the three San Francisco stock boards amounted to 
very nearly $120,000,000. This was two years later 
than the height of the greatest speculative period in the 
history of the lode, and may serve to illustrate what 
used to be called a prosperous year. Without some 
such method of speculation no mine that did not pay 
its expenses from the start could ever have been de- 
veloped except by wealthy owners; no ten or a hundred 
men would have taken the risks and invested the capi- 
tal required to push work on Comstock mines as rapidly 
as it was pushed for fifteen or eighteen years after their 
location. The division of the various mining interests 
into hundreds of thousands of small shares gave every 
one an opportunity to invest in the game of chance. 
As long as many thousands chose to invest, the high- 
pressure system continued. 



152 THE STOHY OF THE MINE. 

Eeports from the San Francisco boards were bul- 
letined in Virginia City as soon as received in times 
when stocks were rushing upward like auroras or fall- 
ing like rocket sticks. Everybody ran to see them — 
flour-dusted bakers, blacksmiths with sledge hammers, 
white-aproned butchers, bare-headed clerks, miners on 
the way to the shafts, a teamster " thrusting his black- 
snake under the housing of his saddle mule " — all 
hurrying to the bulletin boards to see their fates. The 
streets became blocked so that the police had to clear 
a passage, and the town quivered v/ith joy or sorrow 
vv^ith each change in the figures. Sometimes a long- 
drawn sigh, mysterious, universal, sought expression as 
values slipped away down to the depths. 

As for the successful mining operator, time was 
when he was the most aggressive and scintillant figure 
in the social and business worlds of the Pacific coast. 
Such men as " Jim " Keene, " Bill " Lent, " Johnny " 
Skae, General Gashwiler, and others still remembered 
on Pine Street, were men who in their time knew every 
curve and twist of the Comstock market. Hundreds 
of others linked their names with famous mines and 
with thrilling chapters of speculation. Group after 
group rose to power, ruled after their kind, and fell 
from authority. Some few there are who have survived 
many a successive dynasty and are still Eajahs of the 
"White Elephant. In flush times the leaders of stock 
operations were known by their purple and fine linen, 
their splendid equipages and their lavish expenditures, 
generally in San Erancisco, but sometimes in a trail 
of corruscating glory across the continent. But every 
now and then a man was caught on the wrong side of 
the market, which fluctuated at times much more vio- 
lently than anything on Wall Street. Down he went, 
down and under, and new men took his place. Per- 



STOCK AND THE STOCK SPECULATORS. 153 

haps in the course of time, soured and blunted by mis- 
fortune, the unfortunate operator joined the ranks of 
the please-lend-me-a-dollar denizens of Pauper Alley, a 
narrow street in San Francisco between Pine and Cali- 
fornia, where the hopeless wrecks of forgotten storms of 
speculation are drifting to and fro. 

There, in Pauper Alley, one can walk, any time in 
business hours, and see creatures that once were million- 
aires and leading operators. JSTow they live by free 
lunches in the beer cellars and on stray dimes tossed to 
them "for luck." Women, too, form a part of the 
wretched crowd that haunt the ends of the Alley where 
it Joins its more prosperous neighbour streets and beg 
every speculator to give them a " pointer " or to carry 
a share of stock for them. These are the " dead mud- 
hens," as the men are the " dead ducks," of the Com- 
stock share gamblers. Horrible things one sees and 
hears of here. Old friends you thought were pros- 
perous but had not heard of for years shove themselves 
out of the huddle and beg for the price of a glass of 
whisky. There stands a once-prosperous printer, in 
rags — he took flyers on the street too many times. 
Yonder beggar lost $400,000 in a single summer, all 
good gold. The ghost of many a murdered happiness 
walks unseen among these half-insane paupers as they 
chatter like apes of lost fortunes and of the prospects 
of their favourite stocks. Eeally it is a frightful thing 
to walk there and look at the seamy side of the silken 
garment of fortune. 



CHAPTEE XV. 

BOERASCA AXD BOXAXZA. 

A STUDENT of mining interests must rise to a 
broader view than that suggested by the artificial 
stimulus of the stock market. It is something, of 
course, to know what has been wasted in assessments, 
how stocks have fluctuated, and vrhat fortunes have 
been gained or lost therein. But it is in every respect 
more important to observe the development of the 
mines from the standpoint of legitimate business enter- 
prises, entirely independent, in the last analysis, of 
outside gambling elements. Individuals have been 
impoverished, but has the Pacific coast and the world 
at large gained or lost in a financial sense by the mil- 
lions spent upon the Comstock? 

The answer is given in official records. If we take 
the summer of 1859 as the starting point and sum up 
the assessments made by the several Comstock com- 
panies for twenty-one years, we shall arrive at the grand 
total of $62,000,000, according to Government reports. 
Dividends paid during the same period aggregated 
$116,000,000, and to this the statisticians add $2,- 
000,000 for unreported individual profits on mines 
before they were incorporated. Striking a cash bal- 
ance, the Comstock ledger thus exhibits an actual profit 
of $56,000,000. In round numbers, the bullion }ield 
of the group of mines for the same period was valued 
at $306,000,000. Subtracting the profits, we have as 
154 



bohrasca and bonanza. 155 

the cost of the purchasing, maintaining, defending, 
and developing the great lode for twenty-one years, 
$250,000,000. Three fourths of this sum, it must not 
be forgotten, came from the mines themselves; the 
other fourth was the result of direct assessments upon 
the stockholders. 

Turning to consider the other elements of cost, 
we find that the prospectors and original locators upon 
the lode received less than one hundred thousand dol- 
lars for their claims; also that subsequent owners paid 
less than a million dollars out of their own pockets 
as "working capital '^ before the levying of assess- 
ments began. Practically, therefore, and viewed as a 
whole, the Comstock lode in twenty-one years created 
from its yield, and at the cost of only about sixty-three 
million dollars (adding the assessments as previously 
noted), all the values of towns, mills, mines, machinery, 
and other co-ordinate actualities too numerous to cata- 
logue. 

The one distinguishing feature of all mining is the 
fact that the finest engineering skill, the special train- 
ing of geologists and mineralogists, the hereditary in- 
stincts of the descendants of generations of miners, 
are, and always will be, incapable of mapping out min- 
ing territory except by tedious and expensive explora- 
tions. There are in all mines periods of high produc- 
tion separated by periods of low production. There 
must be " honaiiza " and " horrasca/' 

Both these words are borrowed from the ^lexican 
miners. They have musical and expressive phrases 
for cuts, adits, hanging wall, foot wall, tunnels, shafts, 
and every part of a mine, as well as for every operation 
connected with mining. Two Mexican mining terms 
are now generally known to Americans. "When a mine 
is not in pay ore, or the vein has " pinched out " or 



156 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

disappeared, it is ^^ en lorra" or ^' emborrescada/' or 
^^borrasca" As one hears it on the Pacific coast, it 
impHes ill luck or hard times, coupled with stem reso- 
lution to keep pegging away. 

I once heard a rancher greet a friend with, " How 
are things with you, Jim? " 

" Still in borrasca, but it can't last forever," was the 
^epl3^ 

" How did it happen, Jim? '^ 

" Well, I struck pay rock buying cattle in Modoc 
an' tradin' that-a-way. Then tilings sorter dribbled 
out till I dropped down to sheep herding up on the 
Chowcliilla, an' you know that's borrasca." 

" So it is, sure! Yfell, here's wishin', as the Greasers 
say, that you may hev as many days in bonanza as you 
hed in borrasca." 

The antithesis is plain. Bonanza — a large body of 
pay ore — has come to mean especial prosperity. The 
allusion is to a cheerful proverb of the Mexican silver 
miners, which runs: "As many days as you spend in 
borrasca you will surely spend in bonanza." Mexicans 
have often been willing to take leases of non-paying 
mines based upon the condition that if they find a 
bonanza they shall be allowed to work it for as many 
days as they had laboured to find it. Such a lease was 
once given on the Comstock, and the Mexicans spent 
six months tunnelling through barren rock before they 
gave up in despair, much to the joy of the superintend- 
ent, who had begun to tliink they had really found a 
bonanza and were only tr}dng to lengthen their time 
sufficiently to be able to " clean up everything in sight." 

It is one of the striking features of the story of the 
Comstock that some companies have usually been in 
bonanza while others were in borrasca. Something 
on the great lode has been pa3dng dividends even at 



BOERASCA AND BONANZA. 157 

times of greatest depression. The working theory 
of mines is to be exploring for new ore bodies while 
working out the ore in sight, so as to occnpy both work- 
men and mill. But in practice this is often impossible, 
so much " dead work '' has to be done to find and work 
the ore bodies and so nuicli barren space is passed over. 
As long as active exploration is being kept np in a mine 
there is always a chance of a strike. Many stock specu- 
lators depend upon the simple rule of buying whatever 
has been a long time out of luck. This rule has made 
and lost fortunes on the Comstock. 

There is something sudden, unexpected, and tem- 
porary involved in the term " bonanza." No one expects 
or plans for a bonanza of any sort; it means much more 
than merely pay rock. So it usually happens that when 
a company strikes a bonanza the stock has been " kick- 
ing about the street," to use the broker's phrase, which 
means that it was like so much waste paper. The 
chief owners of the mine and their friends try to gather 
in all the stock they can; pretty soon there is a whisper 
of a new bonanza on the Comstock, and up the prices 
go, far above their true value, then they tumble back 
again. The hope of a bonanza, or the rumour of its 
actual presence, has been at the bottom of every stock 
excitement. Safe, steady pay ore produces no such 
flurry on the street. 

What is known on the Comstock as the '^ old suc- 
cession of bonanzas " began comparatively near the 
surface. Ophir, iMexican, Savage, Gould and Curry, 
and Hale and ISTorcross, all found much ore along the 
first line of work. After the vein was discovered to 
dip toward the east the second line of shafts was con- 
structed with larger and better works, and when the 
vein was again reached a large number of very rich 
deposits was found. The gross yield of the various 



158 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

mines during this entire period was as follows: Ophir, 
$30,000,000; Sayage, $16,500,000; Hale and Norcross, 
$11,000,000; Chollar and Potosi, $16,000,000; Gould 
and Curry, $15,000,000; Yellow Jacket, $16,500,000; 
Crown Point, $32,000,000; Belcher, $36,000,000; Over- 
man, $3,350,000; Imperial, $3,750,000; and Justice, 
Kentucky, Sierra ISTevada, and many others, from a 
hundred thousand to more than a million dollars. By 
1865 the total bullion yield of Storey County, most of 
it from the Comstock, was about nine and a half million 
dollars. During the first twelve years after 1859 the 
production of all the mines on the Comstock averaged 
a little over $13,000,000 annually, or a total of $145,- 
000,000. The actual yearly yield, however, fluctuated 
greatly; it rose to seventeen or eighteen millions and 
sank as low as two millions. Work went on with un- 
diminished zeal in every mine on the lode during all 
these twelve years, and those mines that were in bor- 
rasca kept going by means of their monthly assess- 
ments. 

According to modern methods of managing rich 
mines, this enormous yield ought to have made some 
stir abroad, but it hardly seemed to cause much excite- 
ment. Conditions which prevailed on the Comstock 
were such that the larger part of every bonanza went 
into running and extraordinary expenses. I have de- 
scribed a few of the costly mechanical developments 
required, but all along the line magnificent enterprise 
and the most reckless waste went hand in hand, par- 
ticularly in the four or five years after 1860. Money 
was spent lavishly; wages were very high, cost of liv- 
ing was enormous, and the miners had the best of every- 
thing. Behind all this, tens of millions of dollars went 
for experiments with mills and machinery. As for 
salaried officials, the number of relatives and friends 



BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 159 

that the owners of the famous mines managed to sup- 
port by obtaining them sinecures will never be known. 
Clerks by the score were paid with Comstock silver 
until, as the writer of the time casually remarks, " it 
seemed as if half the young men in San Francisco were 
directly or indirectly supported by the Nevada mines." 

How great was the total of this astonishing waste- 
fulness may be gathered from a few statistics. The 
grand old Ophir, after taking out $15,000,000, had 
paid only $1,400,000 in dividends. Half a million, 
to be sure, was in the new Washoe Yalley mill, and per- 
haps a million in machinery on the mine itself, but 
the rest went for salaries, labour, and " supplies." The 
last elastic word had to answer for many missing divi- 
dends in every mine of the epoch. 

As far as Virginia City was concerned, an assess- 
ment mine was often nearly as good as a dividend mine. 
Every one in its employ received just as high wages, 
paid with as much promptness, as the wages at the 
other mines. Lumbermen, freighters, merchants, had 
almost as much support from a mine that was in bor- 
rasca as from one in bonanza, provided that the bor- 
rasca did not prove so continuous as to cause the stock- 
holders to quit work. It was generally thought as 
cheap to keep on doing something as to let the mine 
go to ruin and the machinery become worthless. 
Whether the advance drifts were in barren feldspar, 
in pay ore, or in bonanza, the great mines went on sum- 
mer and winter alike. 

I have already illustrated the expensive processes 
by which the rich ore of the first line of bonanzas was 
wasted, in a previous chapter, by reference to the use- 
less Gould and Curry mill. In those days the stock- 
holders of the mines walked the streets of Virginia 
City " as if pacing the roof of an unfathomable treas- 



160 THE STORY OF THE MIls"E. 

ure-liouse," says Mr. Eliot Lord, " and their heads were 
continually in the clouds. They saw a network of silver 
beneath their feet and the fine strands widening into 
solid wedges of ore.^^ 'No metaphor can exaggerate 
the prevailing delirium. " Men were drunken with 
the wine of sudden success, and scattered their money 
broadcast." A superintendent of Overman filled his 
water tank with champagne for his guests at a wedding. 
Another Nevada mining man put door handles of solid 
silver throughout his entire house. The works, ofiices, 
residences, and stables of officials were constructed 
on a scale of expenditure that would have befitted an 
Oriental prince. Terraces, fountains, thoroughbred 
horses, libraries in morocco " bought by the foot " like 
silver ledges, the costliest of whatever can be worn, 
drank, or eaten — these were counted among the neces- 
saries of existence. 

When the free-handed Californians led in such 
lavishness, the few old-timers who were left soon caught 
the pace. One of these was Sandy Bowers, once a 
Gold Hill placer miner, whose claim was ten feet on 
the Comstock. A washerwoman who was in the camp 
owned ten feet adjoining. Bowers married her, and in 
a year or two, their ground proving to be in the heart 
of the surface bonanzas, they became extremely rich. 
Bowers began in 1861 a stone mansion which finally 
cost him $407,000. While the contractors were at 
work upon the house the v/edded pair went to Europe, 
spending three years there with great comfort to them- 
selves. Before they left. Bowers hired the International 
Hotel and gave a banquet to nearly the whole of Vir- 
ginia City. Every luxury that San Francisco could 
furnish was ordered for the occasion. Bowers's speech 
was long quoted on the Comstock: " Fve had powerful 
good luck in this country, an' now I've got money 



BORIIASCA AND BONANZA. 161 

to throw at the birds. Ther arn't no chance for a gen- 
tleman to spend his coin in this country, an' so me an' 
Mrs. Bowers is goin' ter Yooriip to take in the sights." 
He proceeded to explain that there were few or no people 
worth seeing in America. He considered Horace 
Greeley worth looking at, " likewise Governor Nye and 
old Winnemucca." But what he had really set his heart 
upon was to see ^'^the Queen of England and all the 
other great folks of them countries." Sandy Bowers 
continued to throw his money at the birds — chiefly 
birds of prey, as may easily be conjectured. He died 
in 1868, the mine ceased to pay, and Mrs. Bowers, re- 
duced to poverty, became widely known as the " Seeress 
of Washoe," the most popular fortune-teller on the 
Comstock. 

During the first few years of the Comstock the domi- 
nating individual was undoubtedly the well-known 
William A. Stewart, afterward United States Senator. 
He was a man of large plans, immense fertility of re- 
source, and unblenching courage. Burly, frank- 
spoken, powerful mentally and physically, he was said 
by the Gold Hill 'News to " tower above his fellow-citi- 
zens like the Colossus of Khodes " and to " contain as 
much brass in his composition as that famous statue 
ever had." H the flush times had continued, one can 
hardly see how the authority of " Bill Stewart of Ne- 
vada " could have been shaken. But the times when the 
control of a great mining district passes from one man 
or set of men to others are undoubtedly the times when 
bonanzas fail and stockholders begin to despair. Then 
occurs a general readjustment, and new men force 
themselves to the front as captains of industry. 

Ophir, which had spent a million dollars or more 
in litigation over a piece of mining ground that it after- 
ward bought for seventy thousand dollars; Gould and 



162 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

CuiTy, whose bonanza was plainly at an end by 1864; 
Savage, and others of less importance — these began to 
retrench in every possible way. The trained business 
man began to be in demand; the virtues of adversity 
began to be developed. The wild and passionate min- 
ing-camp leaders, whose impulses were as strong and 
fierce as the waves of the ocean, were slowly giving 
way before a new epoch — that of the close organiza- 
tion of capitalists for motives of self-interest. Gone 
were the Comstocks and O^Eileys, gone was old Finney, 
the Eip Van Winkle of Washoe. Going, too, were 
the early Californians, the snpplanters of the first Com- 
stockers, the early mill-builders, the first lumberers 
in the Washoe foothills, the men of the first line of 
bonanzas. They had spent too royally; the mines were 
in borrasca, monev was scarce, and every one was in 
debt. 

A small, quiet, reserved man, a born financier — 
William Sharon — ^became in the spring of 1864 the 
manager of the branch of the Bank of California at Vir- 
ginia City. It is said that he had devoted much of the 
preceding year to study of the Comstock; he had lost 
a moderate fortune in stocks, and was anxious to re- 
cover himself. For several months before his appoint- 
ment he had been a private financial agent of Ealston's, 
and had saved large sums to the bank. Though almost 
unknown, a few men saw in him the coming master 
of ISTevada. 

Local banking houses were lending money to busi- 
ness men and mill owners for from three to five per 
cent a month; Sharon offered loans on the same se- 
curity at two per cent, and made large advances on 
these terms. While the mines were turning out ore 
the mills could easily pay such interest and make 
mone}^, but as soon as the ore product was checked and 



BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 163 

the music of the stamps ceased, the mill owners were 
in trouble. A mill in White Pine district that had 
cost $200,000 was once vainly offered, when in per- 
. feet condition, for $5,000. Sharon himself once sold 
\ a mill for $3,000 that had cost him $60,000, the original 
loan, and interest. Here in the shadow of dull times 
along the lode were the beginnings of what the public 
soon called '' an infamous, fortified monopoly system." 
The bankers became the mill owners, and ultimately 
managed to control the mines also. Sharon's oppor- 
tunity came through the few years of leanness in the 
producing mines. 

Mill after mill fell into the hands of the Bank of 
California until seven large and well-equipped quartz 
mills with all their water rights, contracts, and privi- 
leges belonged to that institution. Sharon had investi- 
gated every mine on the lode, and believed that there 
was a future for the Comstock far brighter than the 
past. Ealston, though always a daring operator rather 
than a banker, felt doubtful of the future of the mines. 
If they should fail, the abandonment of the district was 
sure to follow, and not only the large sums he had ad- 
vanced upon milling property, but the equally large 
amounts loaned to mining companies (not to individ- 
uals) would be entirely lost. The security was practi- 
cally ore (as yet undiscovered) ; none of the mine owners 
were personally responsible imder the laws of that 
period for company debts. Mills, machinery, all the 
towns of Nevada even, were not worth tuppence if the 
fissure, so barren at the levels being worked in 1865, 
continued barren much below that depth. An absolute 
collapse of the mines and all interests dependent upon 
them was looked upon as a not unlikcl}^ event. Large 
owners began to try to sell, with the usual result of 
breaking the stock market completely. 
13 



104 THE STORY OF TEE MINE. 

At this time Ealston visited the Comstock. It pre- 
sented a melancholy picture of a mining camp in eclipse, 
and he became very uneasy at the situation. How much 
the Bank of California then had invested is not known, 
but it vv^as said by Mr. Sharon, years later, that at one 
time before 1870 three million dollars of the live million 
dollars capital of the bank was loaned on the Comstock. 
The leading bank of the Pacific coast had virtually 
become a mine-supply company for a group of silver 
mines in Waslioe! It already controlled some of the 
mines at the time the mills began to fall into its pos- 
session, and, upon Sharon's advice, the policy of con- 
quest was pursued with redoubled energy. The bank 
in the hands of Ealston and his friends was liberal, 
enterprising, speculative, and at times enormously 
profitable, but it was managed in a spirit that was far 
removed from safe commercial methods. One may 
even say that the whole reckless audacity of the mining 
era of the Pacific coast found its apotheosis in the his- 
tory of the Bank of California, and its tj^pical men in 
Kalston and his group. 

Sharon advised that a corporation should be organ- 
ized by some of the leading men of the Bank of Cali- 
fornia to buy and manage the mills which had come 
into its possession, and that these men (who were al- 
ready holders of much mining stock) should concen- 
trate their energies upon such mines as were producing 
or likely to produce ore for milling. The possibilities 
of profit to this company in case of new ore bodies being 
found were very great, for they would be making con- 
tracts with themselves whenever they sent the ore to 
a custom mill. In June, 1867, therefore, the famous 
Mill and Mining Company was formed by W. C. Eal- 
ston, "William Sharon, Alvinza Hay ward, D. 0. Mills, 
and others. They were soon called the " fortified mo- 



BORRASCA AND BONANZA* 165 

nopolists/^ and nearly all the vested interests of the 
State of j^evada other than their own were soon arrayed 
against them. 

There are but two systems of handling ores: each 
mine can ov/n its own mill, or it can send its ores to 
a custom mill. In the one case the mine owners build 
and carry on the mills, managing them through salaried 
employees; in the other they contract with the lowest 
bidders who can and will guarantee fair returns. Both 
systems have drawbacks. On the Comstock the experi- 
ment made by some mines of building their own mills 
had been a sad one; the free, energetic mill owner 
became a more efficient ore-worker than the hired mill 
superintendent. But the Comstockers did not protect 
the permanent interests of the mill men to whom they 
owed so much. What Prof. Kaymond has called the 
piratical policy of gutting the mines was carried on at 
such a shocking rate of speed that it first unduly stimu- 
lated the building of mills and afterward left the mines 
totally unable to sustain any of them. 

Ealston's Mill and Mining Company in two years 
was the owner of seventeen mills, some obtained by 
foreclosure of mortgages, others by purchase. While 
outside mills could not make a living, those of the 
syndicate were kept running night and day, crushing 
nearly all the ore of the region. E'aturall}^, the syn- 
dicate fought ever3rthing that threatened to reduce its 
profits or check the progress of its plans to become 
absolute master of the Comstock and its allied interests. 
It fought Sutro, because his tunnel might permit out- 
side mills on the Carson Eiver to work ore even 
cheaper; it fought the independent mines and mills; 
it entered politics and fought against certain laws and 
for other laws after the manner of similar syndicates 
the world over. It began to hedge about the free Com- 



166 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

stock miner, and slowly but surely all men became aware 
that the substitution of the Sharon group for the Stew- 
art group as the leading personal influence in i!^evada 
was a complete revolution — the greatest that the sage- 
brush land had yet seen. 

During this period of depression, when the Com- 
stock lode fell measurably into the hands of this small 
group of Bank of California men, almost the first 
scheme of Sharon and his associates was the building 
of a railroad to connect the mines with more distant 
mills owned by the syndicate, and both with the main 
Central Pacific line. It was an old idea, like every- 
thing else, long rolling about — a mere tumble-weed 
of the desert. Legislatures, both Territorial and State, 
had granted charter after charter to different parties 
who agreed to build railroads after a manner which 
looked excellently well on paper. But these premature 
and miscellaneous projects of universal railroad build- 
ing in that wild mountain land were without definite 
purpose, and soon sank into a state of innocuous desue- 
tude. 

Then Sharon, the man of affairs, sent for the best 
mining surveyor on the Comstock. This was Superin- 
tendent James, of the Sierra Nevada Company. The 
conversation that follows is from his o^vn statement. 
Sharply, and without a word of explanation, Sharon 
said: 

^' James, can you run a railroad from Virginia City 
to the Carson Eiver? '' 

'' Yes.'' 

" Do it at once." 

The next day a party of surveyors were in the field 
along the mountain trails and highways. In a month 
the twenty-one miles of the route were mapped out, 
grading had been already commenced, and the rails 



BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 1G7 

had been ordered in England. Sharon himself had not 
been idle. He had formed his company, had bought 
out the necessary rights of those who had several mori- 
bund charters, and had obtained from the Legislature 
a new charter. More than this, he had secured legis- 
lative authority for the issuance of $500,000 in bonds 
by the counties of Storey and Ormsby as a free gift 
to the railroad. It is needless to add that the counties 
duly issued the bonds, and without making any condi- 
tions whatever. The mining companies on the lode 
subscribed $700,000. Eather a busy thirty days this, 
and well worth noting as an instance of Comstock 
energy. 

Before April 750 men were at work, and by May 
1,200, distributed in thirty-eight camps, strung along 
the line from Carson to Virginia City. Other gangs 
were hewing ties in the Sierras. On September 28th, 
the English rails having arrived, the first one was laid, 
and -.on !N"ovember 12th the first engine reached Gold 
Hill. The road cost $1,750,000, and as much more 
was spent the next year in extending it to a junction 
with the Central Pacific at Eeno. 

What the engineers had done in the construction 
of this little railroad was to lay out a line with a grade 
of about 1,600 feet in thirteen and a half miles. The 
maximum grade is 11.6 feet to the mile, and the curves 
of the road in thirteen and a half miles of mountain 
distance make seventeen. full circles of the track. It 
justly ranks as one of the noteworthy achievements 
of American mining camps. 

Trouble followed fast enough: the fine old silver 
freighter, in N'evada slang the mule-skinner; the bull- 
puncher, swinging his oxen around the logging camps 
west of Washoe Valley; even that aristocrat of the 
fraternity, the lordly '^ silk-popper," flicking his play- 



168 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

f ul whip at the leaders as he skilfully steered his loaded 
stages along the precipices down Gold Canon to Silver 
City and Dayton — these, all these, after lond complaint 
and nnavailing struggles, went their ways into the un- 
railroaded distance in search of new camps. " Sharon's 
iron mules," as they said, were too much for them. 
Some teamsters redoubled their efforts, determined to 
" beat Sharon or bust.'' One " train " hauled to John- 
town in 1870 weighed, according to the Gold Hill iSTews, 
90,690 pounds, including the wagons; the ore alone 
weighed over thirt5^-six tons. But the locomotive beat 
them, for the engineers sought to surpass each other 
and made some astonishing records for the freight en- 
gines then in use. Finally a fourteen-horse team fell 
over the grade, breaking up the wagons and disabling 
the horses, and the freighters reluctantly retired from 
the imequal contest. 

Cost of transportation was decidedly reduced by the 
railroad. Ore went to Carson for two dollars a ton 
where before it had cost three dollars and a half, and 
this made it possible for the mines to work lower grades 
of ore, long thought too poor to pay expenses. Cord 
wood fell from fifteen dollars a cord to eleven dollars 
and a half. As many as forty-five freight trains went 
daily over the road. The mines, the mills, the freight- 
age, were now in the hands of the S5mdicate, and it began 
to reach out to control both the timber supply and the 
water supply of the Comstock. 

Meanwhile the real condition of the mines had been 
a constant source of profound anxiety to Sharon and his 
associates. ISTone knew better than they did that al- 
though borrasca had put them into possession, a few 
more years of borrasca would utterly smash their for- 
tunes. They had acted with singular discretion and 
energy, had originated and carried out great concep- 



EORRASCA AND BONANZA. 169 

tions, had dared to build their railroad in the darkest 
hour of their enterprise. What next? They held many 
an anxious consultation about the mines. The bullion 
product of the lode which had been $16,000,000 in 
1865 fell to $11,739,100 in 1866, rose somewhat the 
next year, fell heavily to $8,499,769 in 1868, and still 
further to $7,528,607 in 1869. Fewer tons of ore were 
being raised, and the ore was of lower value. The 
"bonanza raisins" in the great Comstock plum pud- 
ding, to use a comparison once made by John W. 
Mackay, were taken out, and, so far as any one knev^, 
there might be no more. In fact, the most experienced 
miners now held that any future deposits of ore would 
be smaller and leaner than before. Mining observa- 
tions elsev/here had seemed to show that there was a 
line a few hundred feet down that marked the limit 
of pay ore. Besides, the Comstock lode was different 
from any other in the impossibility of tracing much 
if any connection between one ore body and another. 
The ores as the mines descended were not only poorer 
but more refractory, and the quartz " gangue," or vein 
matter, was changing to carbonate and sulphate of lime, 
which seldom contained ore. 

There had been eleven bonanzas up to 1869, and all 
of th6se were now nearly exhausted. Ophir was with- 
out pay ore; Gould and Curry and Yellow Jacket were 
yielding less than one fourth their usual product; at 
the south end even the richest of the Gold Hill mines 
were in a bad way. The solitary cause for hopefulness ' 
was the fact that a very narrow vein of promising ore, 
a mere stringer that might develop into something 
better, had been found in Yellow Jacket in November, 
1868. It was on the 900-foot level, and had been care- 
fully studied by all the members of the syndicate, but 
for some time it led to nothing. A struggle with the 



170 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Miners' Union and a disastrous fire in tlie mines added 
still greater intensity to the situation. Some of tlie 
members of the syndicate began to weaken toward the 
end of 1870; it was whispered everywhere that the 
Comstoek had paid its last dividend; the cities on the 
lode were already trembling upon the verge of panic — 
when an apparently barren portion of the Comstoek 
became of the first importance. 

Crown Point mine, 540 feet on the lode, had paid 
no dividends for some time; had in fact levied $240,- 
000 assessments. The superintendent was the noted 
John P. Jones, since United States Senator, an old 
Calif ornian who had been in N'evada only a short time. 
Prom the spring of 1868 till ISTovember, 1870, he had 
hunted in vain for ore by drifts on the 9 00-, the 1,000-, 
and the 1,100-foot levels. Everywhere were barren 
quartz and porphyry. The stock fell to a price which 
rated the total value of the mine with its $140,000 in- 
vested in macliinery alone at only $24,000; the owners 
would not pay another assessment. But late in 1870 
the character of the rock in a new drift that Super- 
intendent Jones was running showed slight changes. 
The hard, gray porphpy that the miners had been 
cutting through in every direction for j^ears began to 
grow softer, with streaks of quartz and red, rusty lines. 
Some two hundred and forty feet from the beginning 
of the drift a seam of clay was found. They cut this, 
and soft white quartz was entered which proved to con- 
tain small knobs of ore. The value of the stock rose to 
ninety dollars on the strength of this promise. By 
May a cross-cut from the 1,200-foot level entered the 
same formation, and the price of shares went to one 
hundred and eighty dollars. 

Alvinza Hayward, receiving private information, 
began to purchase at two dollars a share, and finally ob- 



BORRASCA AND BONANZA. 171 

tained control of the mine^ but he did this as an individ- 
ual, not as a member of the famous Bank of California 
syndicate. This was Sharon^s first and almost only de- 
feat during his career on the Comstock. The Union 
Mill and Mning Company lost because Crown Point 
made contracts elsewhere, and its new owners organized 
the Nevada Mill and Mining Company as a rival to the 
Bank of California. 

But the lesser defeat was merely an incident of the 
larger success of Sharon and his group. Every other 
mine on the lode became much more valuable. Money 
poured into the emptied treasuries of the mining com- 
panies still in borrasca, and the Bank of California 
was placed out of danger for the first time in several 
years. 

Crown Point was one of the Gold Hill group. Its 
bonanza increased the total yield of the district from 
upward of eight millions in 1870 to upward of eleven 
millions in 1871, and this total, swelled by contribu- 
tions from other mines that had begun to get into the 
line of deep bonanzas, was $13,569,000 in 1872. The 
total yield of Crown Point between May, 1861, and May, 
1877, is estimated as close upon twenty-five million dol- 
lars. Crown Point stock reached its highest point in 
1872, when it sold for $1,825 a share — a valuation of 
about twenty-two millions for a property that only 
eighteen months earlier had been rated at $21,000. 
This shows the popular estimate of the new bonanza. 

Thus, as we have seen, the period of litigation over 
the surface bonanzas was followed by a long and almost 
imiversal depression in the values of the various mines, 
which was suddenly ended by discoveries made in a 
hitherto barren mass of porphyry. The uses and op- 
portunities of mining adversity were never more evi- 
dent, for the period of borrasca enabled the Bank cf 



172 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

California syndicate to aecomplisli what would have 
been impossible a few years earlier or a few years later. 
A new group of men had found their longed-for oppor- 
tunity and had many times multiplied their fortunes 
by the dangerous venture. Even Sharon in the ful- 
ness of his power could not prevent others from sharing 
in the results of his organizing abilities; and although 
he had long planned to be master of every bonanza on 
the lode, through prior information and larger capital 
than his associates, he was finally conquered by Jones 
and Hayward in the struggle for Crovv^n Point. 



CHAPTER XYI. 

DAYS OF THE GEEAT BON"ANZA. 

The discovery of Crown Point's bonanza in 1870 
had increased the value of all the mines on the Corn- 
stock by abont $45,000,000. A still greater bonanza 
— the one by which the fame of Nevada was spread 
abroad in every land and every tongue — vras near dis- 
covery, even while Senator Jones was running the fate- 
ful drift that raised Crown Point stock within a year 
from $2 a share to $1,825 and lifted stock of Belcher, 
the adjoining mine, from $1.50 a share to $1,525. 

Even while Hayward and Jones were dividing con- 
trol of the productive mines of the lode with Sharon 
and other members of the Bank of California syndicate, 
two Irishmen, John W. Mackay and James Q. Fair, 
were obtaining the fulcrum upon which to poise and 
turn to their own purposes the most valuable portions 
of the whole Comstock lode. Three San Francisco 
men — James C. Flood, William S. O'Brien, and J. M. 
Walker — were soon joined with them in mining enter- 
prises. Flood and O'Brien had been retailing liquors 
in a large San Francisco saloon. Walker soon sold out 
his interest to Mackay for $3,000,000, lost it in bad in- 
vestments, and died in poverty. The others became 
the four " bonanza kings " of the period, and their 
rise forms one of the most romantic chapters of mining 
life in America. It seems to represent in a typical way 
the splendid and fortunate clement that one likes to 
173 



174 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

think of as belonging to every mining district. It better 
explains the fascination that abides in the very name 
" Comstock " than all the strange and interesting de- 
tails about the mines themselves. 

There was a Dublin-born youth of eighteen named 
Mackay, a shipbuilder's clerk in New York, who was 
placer mining in California in 1852. He saved a little 
money and lost it, saved a little more, and moved to 
Virginia City in 1860. Here he began to run a tunnel 
on a claim, used up his available funds, and went to work 
in the Mexican mine as a timberman underground at 
four dollars a day. That job finished, he swung a shovel 
and pick for the same wages. 

James G. Fair was a Tyrone lad of eighteen when 
he took the California gold fever. He mined on the 
Feather Eiver bars for several years, with little success. 
Then he tried quartz, and became superintendent of 
a Calaveras mine. In 1860, like Mackay, he went to 
the Comstock, and was made superintendent of the 
Ophir, on a good salary, of course, but otherwise, seem- 
ingly, as far from the ultimate ownership of any mine 
on the lode as the most ordinary miner under his super- 
vision. 

In 1860 both Fair and Mackay (like John P. Jones, 
the discoverer of Crown Point bonanza) were poor and 
obscure men. Finney, Comstock, O'Eiley, McLaughlin, 
and the rest of the first owners of the lode had much 
more money and far better opportunities than Mackay, 
Fair, or Jones, who became the three most famous 
miners of the district, and, it is no exaggeration to add, 
the three leading silver miners of America. Flood and 
O'Brien were mere speculators, not miners. They 
paid assessments, but did nothing else to find and gather 
the golden harvest. Flood developed great financial 
ability, but O'Brien was, and remained till the day of 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 175 

his death, a very commonplace individual of mediocre 
talents. 

Sharon had come to the Comstock with capital in 
his control, so that at one time it was said he directed 
the management of every productive mine and every 
operating mill, besides the waterworks, the lumber sup- 
ply, and the railroad — altogether some twenty-five mil- 
lion dollars of real property aside from stock values. 
The new bonanza monarchs. Fair and Mackay, were 
about to raise a piece of seemingly barren territory, 
neglected and despised by Sharon, to the rank of an in- 
dependent and more powerful kingdom, so that the 
Bank of California syndicate, rapidly recovering from 
the blow dealt it by the defection of Jones and Hay- 
ward, was to be permanently made a " second-rate 
power '^ on the Comstock. 

Mackay and Fair, even as young men, deserved 
large success as far as constant labour and study and 
steady habits may be said to deserve it. One easily sees 
that both were strongly imbued with the narrow but 
powerful ambition to become extremely wealthy; that 
each in his especial line of work — Mackay as a miner, 
Fair as a mining superintendent — saved all he could 
and speculated with it for the sole purpose of becom- 
ing a mine owner; and, finally, that both were very 
hard students of mines and of everything connected 
with mines. When they met, each recognised in the 
other a kindred spirit, and they immediately joined 
forces. 

But Mackay outranks the rest of the Comstock 
leaders, because his rise was more remarkable and his 
grasp of circumstances more firm. From a day labourer 
toiling in the lower levels he became superintendent 
of the Caledonia Tunnel and Mining Company. This 
vras at Gold Hill. It had a hundred thousand shares, 



176 THE STORY OF THE MI^^E. 

had yielded by 1878 $345,000, and had assessed its 
stockholders nearly a million and a half dollars. A 
few years later he became one of the principal owners 
of Kentucky a very rich mine ninety-four feet on the 
lode, which up to 1880 had paid $952,000 in excess 
of dividends over assessments. Beyond a doubt, this 
purchase was made because of Mackay^s rare and yaln- 
able faculty of discerning the best time to buy or to 
sell mining stocks. His cool brain, long weighing the 
chances of every inch of explorations in any mine he 
thought of speculating in, was steady in the midst of 
wildest excitement. His own statement is that he 
sought with all the powers of his mind and body to be- 
come "master and manager of the greatest mines in 
the world." Mackay's swift imagination and sanguine 
temperament, controlled by his ambitions, were secret- 
ly on fire with the possibilities he saw in the great lode. 
He dreamed and toiled, hoping to win in some way 
such power as Sharon had. Somewhere in that moun- 
tain mass, pierced a little way here and there by pin- 
holes of drifts, there doubtless lay another bonanza. 
But in which mine? 

After Mackay became part owner of Kentuck he 
received large dividends and was able to make another 
move. Hale and [N'orcross has been mentioned frequent- 
ly in these pages. It was a mine from which much was 
hoped by the most competent authorities. It had im- 
mense unexplored territory and its equipment was un- 
surpassed. Mackay and Fair studied this mine; 
watched its shares rise early in 1868 from $1,360 to 
$2,100; saw also a complete collapse, until by Sep- 
tember the price was less than forty-two dollars a 
share. This gave them a chance, and they controlled 
the mine at the annual election in March, 1879. 
Fair, leaving the Ophir, went in as superintendent, 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 177 

and in a few months it was again on the dividend 
list. 

Old Comstock miners still speak with admiration 
of the " fine nose for ore " that Fair displayed as super- 
intendent. His watchfulness, energy, and strictness of 
discipline were never surpassed in the mines of the 
period. He knew every inch of the miles of under- 
ground Avorkings as Avell as the rooms of his own house, 
and far better than the miners themselves, each of whom 
stays on the level to which he is assigned. The new 
Hale and ITorcross bonanza which he discovered and 
worked out at this period paid $728,000 in dividends 
in 1869 and 1870, more than half of which, of course, 
went into the pockets of himself and his partners. 

One barren section of the lode is between the Gold 
Hill group and the Virginia City group of mines. On 
about twenty-five hundred feet here mere assessment 
work had sunk several million dollars; the stock was 
consequently at a very low figure. Mackay had always 
wished to conduct a thorough exploration of one of 
these barren mines. In 1869 he put money into Bullion 
and became its superintendent. Fair, a year later, 
was elected superintendent of Savage, still retaining 
his interest in Hale and ISTorcross. Four mines of note 
were now controlled by Mackay, Fair, and their allies; 
and they were too shrewd men not to get back all their 
investments as long as there was a stock market. 
Bullion, however, was always a badly named mine; 
no bonanza was ever found there, nor in Savage. The 
Bank of California group of operators began to feel 
better; it had not been much of a storm am-how. In 
a few years more the million or so that Mackay, Fair, 
and the others had made by accident or by speculation 
would be sunk in unproductive mines. Mackay would 
be back in the face of a drift at four dollars a day; Fair, 



178 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

wlio was somewhat of a superintendent^ could be made 
very useful if he would only give up his notions of being 
an independent owner. Meanwhile the Mackay firm, 
weakened financially but still undismayed, were de- 
termined to thoroughly explore another portion of the 
Comstock. 

At the !N'orth End, between Ophir and Best and 
Belcher, there was a long-neglected chain of small loca- 
tions occupying in the aggregate 1,310 feet. Only very 
small deposits of pay ore had been found in this group, 
near the surface, and the owners had lacked capital 
for extensive explorations. Still, the neglected 1,310 
feet lay in the midst of rich property. Beginning at 
the north end of the Comstock and coming south, 
toward Gold Hill, Sierra E'evada held 3,300 feet, and, 
although paying no dividends, was being magnificently 
conducted, exploring every foot of its territory, and 
had its great shaft well down in the second thousand 
feet of distance. 'Next came Union Consolidated with 
600 feet, followed by Mexican, of equal size. Ophir, 
which came next, held 675 feet. South of Ophir were 
the 1,310 feet of neglected claims. Still farther south, 
adjoining these claims, was Best and Belcher with 224 
feet; then Gould and Curry's 921 feet of very rich 
ground, followed by Savage with its 800 feet, and this 
again by the 400 feet of Hale and N'orcross. Here 
were two great groups of paying mines, equipped in the 
best manner, controlled by millionaires, and able to 
continue operating through a long period of borrasca. 
It is one of the most curious facts in the story of the 
Comstock that this little row of long-despised claims, 
flanked on either hand by great rich and prosperous 
mines, should have sat so long disconsolate, a mute 
Cinderella in ashes of pioneer hopes. 

In the course of time several of these minor claims 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 179 

were united into Consolidated Virginia^ 710 feet on 
the lode. Then the new owners spent $200^000 in vain 
prospecting till the shareholders refused to pay another 
assessment. By February, 1871, actual sales showed 
that the mine was worth only $26,000, or less than a 
quarter of the price of the m^achinery. As for Cali- 
fornia ground, the 600 feet between Ophir and Consoli- 
dated Virginia, it had now sunk even lower in public 
estimation. The entire 1,310 feet was a bankrupt piece 
of property worth in the market less than $40,000, as 
shown by occasional sales; really not worth half so 
much, good operators said, for an investment or as a 
speculation. 

Macka)^, Fair, Flood, and O'Brien, regretting their 
losses in Bullion, had resolved to stake their fortunes 
upon the exploration of this comparatively virgin 
ground to great depths. The four operators began 
to gather in stock, but even the most consummate 
skill a|id caution could not secure control at the lowest 
figure— that of less than $40,000 for the whole 1,310 
feet. They paid, it is said, about $100,000 before they 
were satisfied to announce their control, by which time 
they had about three fourths of the stock of both Cali- 
fornia and Consolidated Virginia locked up in their 
safes, and they took possession in January, 1872. 

The new mine owners first turned their attention to 
the development of the 710 feet known as Consolidated 
Virginia. During 1872 they levied assessments to the 
amount of $212,000 upon Consolidated Virginia stock 
and spent it all in development. They sank a 
large shaft and pushed a drift north from Gould and 
Curry through Best and Belcher (1,167 feet below the 
surface) into the ground of Consolidated Virginia. 
This was done, of course, under especial arrangements 
with the owners of those mines. 
13 



180 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Fair was superintendent, and at last, in driving 
this costly drift tlirongli barren rock, liis experienced 
eye discovered a slight change and a narrow seam of 
rich ore hardly thicker than a knife-blade. He ordered 
the men to follow it Y»^ith the drift inch by inch through 
the vein matter. They did so, even where only a film 
of clay showed where the thin ore streak had *^ pinched 
ont.'^ After a while the slender clew was again picked 
np, and so Fair and his workmen followed the dark 
line of silver snlphnrets through the labyrinths for 
hundreds of feet. Fair became ill, and the drift, though 
managed by old and experienced miners, was run far 
east of the clew while he was absent, but on his 
return he went back and picked up the ore thread. 
The drift was now a hundred feet into Consohdated 
"Virginia without anything of importance having been 
found. The value of the mine, which had greatly in- 
creased when the four bold speculators gained con- 
trol, began to decrease, and it was thought that out- 
siders would hardly stand another assessment. 

While matters were in this condition and people 
were saying that the daring operators had come to 
grief, the metallic film so long followed by Fair with his 
*^ fine nose for ore " rapidly widened to a seven-foot 
vein averaging sixty dollars to the ton. Cutting across 
this vein and extending the cut at each side, two nar- 
rower veins were found. After a month's further 
progress the main vein was twelve feet wide. The shaft 
which was to reach this ore body was being pushed 
night and day until early in October it reached the de- 
sired point, and the exploration of the ore body was then 
carried on with system. Where the shaft struck ore, 
at the depth of 1,167 feet, the width of the body was 
now forty feet. The miners were not yet " in bonanza," 
but they felt themselves very near to it. Plenty of pay 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 181 

ore was in sight, and they had an ore body of unknown 
size to explore, measure, and assay before taking it out. 
Eunning a drift southeast from the bottom of the shaft 
for two hundred and fifty feet, it cut into a very rich 
body of ore, a true bonanza, as they knew at once, 
though they were of course ignorant of its extent. 

It was high time to have some recompense for years 
of costly and unremunerative exploration. On October 
16th the skilled and athletic miners began to " breast 
out '^ and extract the ore in the chamber. By the end 
of the month they had hewn out a space twenty feet 
high and fifty-four feet across the bonanza, supporting 
it with square sets of timbers as fast as they removed 
the ore. They had also extended the drift one hundred 
and forty feet farther through the vein, and every 
inch of it was still in ore. The sides, the floors, and 
the roofs of chamber and of drift assayed everywhere 
at rates that ranged from $90 to $630 per ton. The 
top had been pried off from Nature's huge treasure- 
vault. 

October was a month of such work as had never 
been seen before on the Comstock or in any other mine 
known to history, and it was only the beginning of 
still greater exploits of disciplined labour, as shifts 
of brawny men, stripped to the waist, toiled in the 
depths in the way that sailors toiled at Trafalgar be- 
tween the decks of fighting ships of the British line. 
The shaft was sunk steadily three feet a day, and at 
the 1,200-foot level a drift showed that the ore body 
continued and grew wider. By this time it began to 
be said in Virginia City that the Consolidated Virginia 
" had a good mine." That was all. The matter was 
kept so quiet that no excitement occurred in the stock 
market. The directors had met, however, and had 
increased the capital stock of Consolidated Virginia to 



182 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

108,000 shares of $100 each; they soon put the Cali- 
fornia upon the same basis, and retained control in 
both mines. Consolidated Virginia was taldng ont 
two hundred tons of ore a day at the close of October, 
and in a short time the bullion shipments were $250,- 
000 a month. 

The work of exploration went on, and the immen- 
sity of the ore body was more and more plainly revealed 
through the winter of 1873 and the spring and sum^mer 
of 1874. The bonanza was cut across at a depth of 
1,400 feet, and also at the 1,500-foot level, in 1874. 
Here the ore was of such unparalleled richness that 
for the first time the outside world of mining men 
and speculators began to talk about it. How much 
farther it might extend in depth or vfidth, or how 
many of the l^orth-End mines might finally be found 
to have a slice of it, not even the skill of the four 
bonanza owners could determine. But so carefully 
and steadily had the work progressed that no one had 
been startled by the sudden development. The richest 
hoard of gold and silver that had ever dazzled the eyes 
of a treasure-seeker caused for a time less excitement 
than the every-day strikes in small mines. 

The truth is, Mackay and Fair vrere not interested 
at this time in the stock market. They had control, 
and all they wanted was to be let alone. They were 
not speculators any more; they were simply miners; 
neither of the mines were for sale, nor did they care 
to buy any more mines. Their restless ambitions, so 
long unfulfilled, wished to reap golden harvests from 
acres of ore. There was so little attempt at conceal- 
ment, in sharp contrast with the course that had been 
pursued in regard to the earlier bonanzas, that it is 
probable this really caused the apathy that long pre- 
vailed among the masses of stock speculators. Wlien 




Down in a (ioKl Mine. 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 183 

the capital of Consolidated Virginia was increased to 
108,000 shares they sold at about forty-five dollars, 
gradually rising to par value ($100), and early in No- 
vember, 1874, to $115. Shares in California were 
much cheaper, and in September, 1874, had only 
reached $37. 

There were " short turns " and speculations num- 
berless in the stock during the year and a half that 
followed the ore-find of March, 1873, but, all in all, 
the inability of the stock speculators, both leaders and 
masses, to comprehend the greatness of the discovery 
seems inexplicable. It is better to reverse the point 
of view and say that we have in this fact another fine 
illustration of the uncertainties of mining. Sharon 
and all his group of allies, and the shrewdest of outside 
San Francisco speculators, thought for months that 
the gigantic energies spent in further explorations 
in Consolidated Virginia was because the ore body 
was not very large after all, and because new deposits 
were being sought for. As soon as they became con- 
vinced that the bonanza was really unprecedented in 
magnitude they hastened to buy heavily, but by this 
time the general public had been roused to a sudden 
fever of excitement and the value of the famous mines 
rose every hour on the stock boards. In December, 
1874, Consolidated Virginia reached $610 per share, 
rising again in January to $700, vfhich made the sell- 
ing value of the mine $75,600,000. California stock 
went even higher, for it was said that the bonanza ex- 
tended over from Consolidated Virginia in such a way 
as to give the California mine the larger part. Cali- 
fornia shares worth $37 in September rose to $780 
in January, 1875, making the valuation of that mine 
$84,240,000. The 1,310 feet on the lode which had 
been valued five years before at forty or fifty thousand 



184 THE STORY OF THE ^MINE. 

dollars was now worth in the market, according to stock 
sales, about $160,000,000. 

Leaving the stock market, let ns return to the 
depths of Consolidated Virginia. During 1874 
the miners had been searching systematically through 
the ore bodies. They made drifts and crosscuts on 
each level, extending their work far north into the 
California; they made winzes from level to level to use 
in removing ore. They proved that the width of the 
mass was from one hundred and fifty to three hundred 
and twenty feet, and that the richness continued with- 
out abatement through drift after drift, level below 
level. The ore output increased, and a dividend of 
three dollars a share declared in May, 1874, had been 
followed by others. " The scene within this imperial 
treasure-house," writes Mr. Lord, " was a stirring sight. 
Cribs of timber were piled in successive stages from 
basement to dome, four hundred feet above, and every- 
where men were at work in changing shifts, descending 
and ascending in the crowded cages, clambering up 
to their assigned stopes with swinging lanterns or 
flickering candles, picking and drilling the crumbling 
ore or pushing lines of loaded cars to the stations on 
the shaft. Flashes of exploding powder were blazing 
from the rent faces of the stopes; blasts of gas and 
smxoke filled the connecting drifts; mufiled roars echoed 
along the dark galleries; and at all hours a hail of rock 
fragments might be heard rattling on the floor of a 
level, and massive lumps of ore falling heavily on the 
slanting pile at the foot of the breast.'^ 

When the fifteen-hundred-foot level was reached 
and the ore cut into was richer than ever before known 
on the Comstock, the Territorial Enterprise, of Virginia 
City, came out with double-leaded columns, under the 
heading of Heart of the Comstock. Of the lowest cross- 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 185 

cut the Enterprise said: ^^ It has been bored into the 
bonanza through a mass of chloride and sulphuret ores 
which excites the imagination of all beholders. It is 
now in two hundred and five f eet^, ninety-five of which 
is in the extraordinarily rich ore of which so much has 
been heard. In this crosscut was encountered, a day or 
two since, the stephanite, a species of ore that is almost 
pure silver. At the distance of one hundred and eighty 
feet from the crosscut a chamber of about ten feet each 
way has been excavated. Its walls on every side are a 
mass of the finest chloride ore filled with streaks and 
bunches of the richest black sulphurets. It looks as 
if the whole mass grew richer with every foot of the 
advance." Ores of this kind assay up into the thou- 
sands of dollars, but it seemed impossible that such 
large masses of silver should have been deposited, even 
in the Comstock, so the Enterprise reporter brought 
his estimates down to one hundred dollars a ton, re- 
duced the size of the deposit, and figured out $116,- 
748,000 in sight. 

It is no secret on the Comstock that this reporter 
was William Wright, widely known on the Pacific coast 
as " Dan De Quille," one of the best living v.- riters on 
mining subjects. He had been through and through 
the mines hundreds of times, and had really made the 
reputation of the Enterprise for accurate mining news. 
There was no one else to do his work; if he went away 
for a vacation, the proprietors were pretty sure to tele- 
graph that his substitute " was getting fooled every 
day underground," and he had to hurry back again. 
He was the first outsider to see the great ore body, and 
his own account of the circumstances under which 
he received an invitation to examine it is very char- 
acteristic. 

" The San Francisco newspapers," said he when 



186 THE STOPwY OP THE MINE. 

interviewed, "had been saying for a long time tliat 
there was no ore in ConsoHdated Virginia; that people 
w^ere getting np a stock deal. Some of us happened 
to know, however, that Fair had been quietly taking 
ore out of the mine through the old Bonner shaft. 
One day he drove up to the Enterprise oflace and 
came in. 

" ' Those city papers have been abusing us long 
enough,' he remarked; 'I won't stand it! Where's 
Dan? I want him to go down to the mine. Til show 
liim what we're doing.' 

" This was before any one had definite knowledge 
of the strike. It was before the Enterprise had printed 
anything important, you understand — only rumours 
or street talk. Yfhen I had been in the mine before 
I conld not get into those drifts. Eair spoke pretty 
loud, as if he only wanted to shut up the city papers, 
but probably he had all the stock he wanted and had 
just got ready to tell the truth; I don't know. Any- 
way, I jumped up and ran out when I had the v/ord; 
you never saw a reporter go faster. We drove to the 
mine and went down to the richest place in the 
bonanza. 

" Fair said: ' Go in and climb around. Look all you 
want, measure it up, make up your own mind; I won't 
tell you a thing; people will say I posted you! ' And so 
he went away. That just suited me. After I was 
through I went to the Enterprise office and wrote two 
articles, one of wliich you have just quoted from. That 
Avas the first authentic account of the big bonanza, and 
that was the way the Enterprise had a scoop." 

A little later a visitor to the mine " stood where 
the miners were digging ore, and looked a hundred 
feet upward and on each side across the ore body. On 
all sides of a pjTamidal mass of timbers, growing larger 



DAYS OP THE GREAT BONANZA. 187 

each moment under the toil of busy hands, were twin- 
kling stars of lamps where men were hewing at the sides 
and ceiling.'^ Often the sides of the huge cavern 
glistened as if set with silver; but this was not silver 
— only crystals of iron and copper pyrites. There were 
also great masses of blue, purple, and v/hite crystals 
of quartz, some of them weighing many pounds, with 
crystals several inches long. The miners say of a vein 
that contains such crystals that " it is alive " and think 
that the best of signs of a large bonanza. Chloride 
silver ore is pale-green and steel-gray in colour. " Sil- 
ver glance '^ is black and lustrous. The general colour 
scheme of the great bonanza, despite an occasional 
glitter of crystals, ranged from bluish gray to deep 
black. 

All of the contents of the bonanza were sent to the 
mill Just as it was blasted or hewn out. Some of the ore 
was so rich that waste rock and low-grade ore were 
mixed with it in order to work it better. An average 
block of ore three feet square contained from three hun- 
dred to five hundred dollars in silver and gold. Even in 
the widest part of the ore body, three hundred feet 
across, the entire contents v/ere milled without assort- 
ing. Some of the richest ore was near the line of the 
California mine, where a mass of porphyry crowded the 
ore into less space. The silver here was often in the 
form of crystals of stephanite, or in bunches of pure 
and malleable silver, in coiled wires, and in silver crys- 
tals. There is hardly any more beautiful sight in a mine 
than a " nest " of wire gold or wire silver gleaming in 
the dark sulphurets. A few of the more exquisite com- 
binations of metals and crystals that occur at times in 
mines of the first rank are still preserved in cabinets, 
but by far the greater part have been destroyed, sent 
to the mill if valuable mineral, or to the dump heap if 



188 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

unremunerative. Old miners in some of the famous 
mines teH stories of cavities as large as an ordinary 
room into which a drift will sometimes break; cavi- 
ties set thick with rock crystals of every beautiful colour 
known to the mineralogist — white^ pale pink, olive- 
green, rose, purple, or violet. In such a glorious place 
it seems, even to the ignorant miners, as if the jewel 
caskets of monarchs had been surpassed, for here Na- 
ture has the hues of sapphire, emerald, tourmahne, 
amethyst, chrysoprase, opal, and lapis lazuli. Such 
crystal rooms are extremely rare, and more often occur 
in N'ew Mexico and Sonora than in Nevada districts. 
One ore chamber ten feet square, situated about four- 
teen feet south of the Cahfornia line, seemed to Com- 
stockers the richest part of the lode, and many speci- 
mens of ore from here were saved for collectors in vari- 
ous parts of the world. 

Now that the Pacific coast was stirred with the 
great news, estimates of the actual "ore in sight" 
began to be in order. I have alluded to the first news- 
paper estimate of about $116,000,000. Next came 
Mr. Diedesheimer, the inventor of the "square- 
set system" and one of the most careful mining en- 
gineers on the Pacific coast. He reported to the 
directors that there was $1,500,000,000 in sight, and 
added that each mine ought to pay in dividends $5,000 
a share under proper management. A little later he 
gave proof of his faith in his own report by putting 
every dollar he could raise into shares in the two mines 
at the highest price. Even the director of the Carson 
mint, with his assistants, who examined the bonanza, 
was unable to fix any definite limit to its yield, and 
thought there was not less than $300,000,000 already 
in sight. Mackay, however, a miner of unsurpassed 
judgment, utterly refused to make any estimate, and 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 189 

flatly said it was an impossible task, because barren 
masses of rock, porphyry, the difficulty of obtaining 
accurate assays, and many other elements of uncer- 
tainty made calculation absurd. He " preferred to 
mine it out first and then take the milling returns.^^ 

The public made loud demands for estimates, and 
for a thousand other details, often beyond the power 
of human ability to satisfy. Whatever was said or was 
left unsaid, the men who controlled the bonanza were 
abused and misrepresented. That was a part, and no 
small part, of the price they had to pay for their ful- 
filled ambitions. Powerful though Mackay and his 
companions were in their own field, neither they nor 
any other men could control the genius they had re- 
leased from the casket of the bonanza. The actual 
available capital of the Pacific slope that could be put 
into mining ventures in January, 1875, was not greater 
than $20,000,000. To tie up more than this in such 
investments or speculations would be to injure and 
seriously check the growth of the western third of the 
continent, l^ow, as I have. already shown, the stock- 
board valuation put upon the two bonanza mines in 
that month was $160,000,000. It is not likely that 
more than a fourth of the stock was ever in the market, 
but the entire Pacific coast, as above stated, could not 
have bought and paid for more than twenty millions' 
worth. 

Then, too, in addition to the immense and probably 
justifiable valuations put upon the Consolidated Vir- 
ginia and California, every other mine upon the lode 
had greatly risen in estimated value. The prices paid 
in January, 1875, showed that Opliir had risen to over 
$31,000,000 because it was next to the bonanza mines; 
Best and Belcher was rated at nearly $9,000,000, and 
Mexican a trifle higher; Gould and Curry, Savage, 



190 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

Exchequer, Yellow Jacket, OYerman, Bullion, Crown 
Point, and several others were valued at from three 
to twenty millions apiece. It made little or no differ- 
ence where they vv^ere located. Indeed, the theory was 
now held by most speculators that every so-called " bar- 
ren " place in the lode would prove to have immense 
ore bodies somewhere below the thousand-foot level. 
The total valuation of all the mines on the lode at 
this date was $393,253,44:0. How much gold coin 
would really have been needed at this time to buy not 
merely the floating stock in the market, but also 
enough to control every mine on the lode is hardly 
to be estimated. There was not enough coin in 
America. 

Evidently, even if all the Comstock mines had been 
worth the price asked, California and the rest of the 
Pacific coast did not have a tenth part of the available 
capital to sustain such a valuation. "When the trans- 
fers at only one of the three stock boards were $50,- 
000,000 for a single month, it is evident that the pace 
had been set pretty fast, for prices had now become 
so high that nearly every one was compelled to buy on 
a margin; there was not money enough to do otherwise, 
l^aturally the " shorts '' had their innings. A few 
stories that the bonanza had given out started a ruinous 
panic at the close of Pebruary that completely demoral- 
ized the money market. Consolidated Virginia fell 
two hundred dollars per share in a week. California 
lost sixty per cent of its market value. Other stocks 
on the lode and outside fell in much greater propor- 
tion. The result spelled ruin in large capitals to thou- 
sands of families. The Bank of California failed in 
August of that fateful year, and Ealston, the main- 
spring of countless enterprises, died in the waters of 
San Prancisco Bay. The entire community staggered 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. 191 

under disasters broiiglit on by wild speculation in 
stocks. It was the Black Friday of the State of Cali- 
fornia. 

The public charged Mackay, Fair, and their com- 
rades with speculating in their own stocks, and so 
creating the alternate panics and short-lived booms 
of the great bonanza period. Books were published 
— sometimes novels, sometimes bitter essays — that de- 
scribed with the sarcasm and emphasis or a Swift innu- 
merable supposed crimes of the bonanza kings against 
the rest of humanity. Time, however, has caused many 
of these hasty accusations to be forgotten. The be- 
haviour of the new-made plutocrats was not essentially 
worse than the behaviour of the earlier groups of 
bonanza owners. Mackay, the typical miner of the 
company, kept himself especially free from outside 
deals. Later, alluding to the crash in stocks, he said: 
" It is no affair of mine. I am not speculating in stocks. 
My business is mining — ^legitimate mining. I see that 
my men do their work properly in the mines and that 
all goes on as it should in the mills. I make my money 
here out of the ore.^^ 

Prices of shares had no influence upon the work 
in the mines. Through good days and evil the ore 
yield increased. Consolidated Virginia extracted about 
12,000 tons in 1873, producing in bullion $645,000; 
in 1874, 91,000 tons, of a milling value of $4,981,000; 
in 1875, 169,000 tons, milling over $16,000,000; and 
in 1876, 142,000 tons, milling over $16,000,000. Then 
the product began to lessen. The exact amount of ore 
extracted in six years ending with 1878 was 682,385 
tons. The bullion product was $60,732,882. Cali- 
fornia in 1875 and the three years following extracted 
486,043 tons of ore, which gave tlic total bullion yield 
of $43,727,831. Nearly $105,000,000 was the product 



192 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

of the Big Bonanza, as Comstockers have always called 
this body of ore. 

As for dividends, everything was done to increase 
them. The returns to stockholders were unprece- 
dented in the stories of great mining enterprises. By 
the middle of 1879 Consolidated Virginia had paid 
fifty-two dividends aggregating $42,120,000, and Cali- 
fornia had paid in dividends $31,050,000. A thou- 
sand miners were employed; a new and much larger 
shaft was sunk. Mills and machinery had been re- 
built and enlarged at great expense. But all other 
duties had given v/ay to the imperious necessity of tak- 
ing out ore as fast as possible, so great were the dangers 
of a frightful accident. Every difiiculty met with in 
removing other bonanzas seemed intensified in this 
case. The hot clay, feldspar, and ore seethed and 
swaj'Cd as the men worked. Forests of timbers, con- 
tinually needing care and renewal, were rotting, break- 
ing, and being crushed together. A single spark might 
make the mine a pit of flame, and probably would so 
cave and ruin it that it could only be reopened by years 
of labour and at vast outlay. Mackay, keenly alive 
to the ever-present dangers of fire and collapse of the 
supports, left nothing to chance, but inspected the 
drifts in person night after night. His tireless vigi- 
lance had its rewards, for no accident happened until 
the bonanza was fairly worked out. A few years later 
fires broke out in some of the abandoned levels of both 
the mines, and the men bulk-headed all the connecting 
drifts so as to shut the air out. The timbers smouldered 
for weeks, and the drifts finally became totally unfit 
for passage — a very labyrinth of traps and pitfalls 
shunned by every miner to this day. 

After 1879, the close of the bonanza period came 
with exceeding swiftness. The stock of the thirty 



DAYS OF THE GREAT BONANZA. I93 

mines on the lode, valued in 1875 at over $393,000,000, 
sank in February, 1880, to something less than $7,- 
000,000. California sold for $1.25 a share and Con- 
solidated Virginia for $1.90, and so on down the for- 
lorn list. How had the mighty fallen! The great 
bonanza, after yielding in five years nearly $105,000,- 
000, was exhausted, and nothing even approaching 
in value to the earlier group of ore bodies has since 
been discovered. Hundreds of thousands of tons of 
low-grade rock have been taken out of long-neglected 
portions of the mines and worked at a profit, small 
dividends have been paid by a few mines, and the work- 
ing efficiency of the lode has been well maintained. 
There may be new bonanzas in the depths or new grains 
of metal hidden in husks of porphyry, but nothing 
of striking importance has since been found. Once 
more the endurance of the mine owners and of the 
towns on the lode is being severely tested. California 
ceased paying dividends in 1879; Consolidated Virginia 
paid its last dividend in 1880. Fourteen years of bor- 
rasca have ruined successive stockholders, have caused 
the decay of once-populous mining towns, and have, 
in short, come near to breaking the hearts of the brave 
old Comstockers. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

TnS SUTEO TUNNEL. 

In the days when Yirginia City was founded there 
came to the collection of " dug-outs/' tents, and brush 
huts a young man of small means but boundless energy. 
He was a volunteer in the PjTamid Lake battle with the 
Indians, and gave one of the most lucid and trustworthy 
accounts we have of that disastrous affair. He was 
afterward in business in Virginia City, and in 1861 
he built a quartz mill on the Carson Eiver. In a short 
time he became convinced that a deep drainage tunnel 
was absolutely necessary to the continued working 
of the great lode and he advanced this idea on every 
occasion, until people began to consider him a crack- 
brained enthusiast. 

The notion appeared to most men entirely imprac- 
ticable. The point at which Sutro wished to see the 
lode cut by a tunnel was nearly two thousand feet below 
the surface — much deeper than any miners in the early 
^60's thought it possible to carry on operations. He 
scorned the lesser and temporary usefulness of small, 
short tunnels from the heads of the adjacent canons; 
what he advocated was a large tunnel from the floor 
of the Carson Valley, distant about four miles in a 
horizontal line from the lode. 

It must be explained that a tunnel run into a hill 
so as to strike the ledge at some point below the sur- 
face is either for prospecting and ore-handling pur- 
194 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. I95 

poses, or it is purely a drainage and ventilation tun- 
nel, or it combines to some extent these several uses. 
A mining country that contains high mountains and 
short, steep ravines is well adapted to tunnels, or adits, 
as mining engineers often call them. Sometimes they 
afford vastly more economical methods of opening up 
and working mines than by shafts, but, of course, in 
many cases there is no opportunity for tunnels. Some- 
times when a ledge has been well prospected on the 
surface high up on a mountain the very first thing 
done is to run a tunnel often several thousand feet long, 
so as to strike the ledge, and then work up to meet a 
shaft started from the top. If this is five hundred feet 
from the end of the tunnel, the miners say they have 
" five hundred feet of backs." That is, they can take 
out that much ore by gravity alone, and so can handle 
it very cheaply. 

Three or four years of constant study and active 
work had already made Sutro a man of note among 
his fellows in that cyclonic vortex of life and motion — 
early !N'evada. He became widely known as a man 
of immense capacity for affairs; one who was gifted 
with unconquerable tenacity of purpose and fertility 
of resource. He gradually organized the enterprise 
known by his name, and for twenty years was one of 
the most interesting figures in the story. 

Sutro soon gained the attention of Stewart, Ral- 
ston, and others; in fact, Stewart became president 
of the company organized in 1864 to construct 
a tunnel after Sutro's plans. The first l^evada Legis- 
lature, in February, 1865, passed an act granting a 
franchise, right of way, and other privileges to Sutro 
and his associates. The amount of royalty to be paid 
by the mines that would be benefited by the tunnel 
was left to subsequent agreement between the Tun- 
14 



196 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

nel Company and the owners of the various mines. 
After eight months of strenuous efforts Sutro secured 
contracts from twenty-three mining companies, repre- 
senting, it is said, ninety-five per cent of the whole 
market value of the lode. In these contracts the mines 
were bound perpetually to pay to the Tunnel Company 
two dollars a ton for every ton of ore taken out after 
the tunnel had reached given points so that it could 
be used. The mines were to also pay a fixed rate per 
ton for the transportation of waste rock, debris, or any 
material from the mines, and of supplies from outside, 
besides a certain price for each and every person in 
their employ who passed through the tunnel. 

The only requirement of the State Legislature was 
that Sutro and his allies should secure three million 
dollars by August, 1867, and should spend a certain 
amount annually in the enterprise. As soon as the 
mines had agreed to the various royalties and payments, 
which were considered very reasonable by all con- 
cerned, it seemed as if the chief obstacle was rem^oved 
and capital could be secured. At this time, early in 
1866, there was unbroken harmony on the lode in re- 
spect to the tunnel proposition. Sharon, Ealston, and 
the nevvdy organized Bank of California syndicate were 
foremost in approval. Sutro was now arranging to 
obtain the capital, and Ealston furnished him vdth. 
letters of introduction stating that the tunnel was prac- 
ticable and could not fail to be very profitable. Mean- 
while Sutro, anxious to protect his enterprise at every 
point, secured the passage of an act of Congress which 
defined and secured the rights and privileges of the 
Tunnel Company. During the fiercest of conflicts a 
few years later this act of Congress was all that saved 
the enterprise. 

Thus protected, it would seem as if the Sutro Tun- 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 197 

nel Company had nothing more to do except to sell 
stock or bonds and begin work. The mine owners had 
agreed to his terms; the State and the nation had given 
the strongest possible title to its rights, franchises, 
and lands. Its plans v/ere now completed for a main 
tunnel of 20,489 feet from the Carson Valley to the 
shaft of the Savage mine. Two lateral tunnels were 
afterward planned, following the trend of the Com- 
stock northerly and southerly from the Savage shaft. 
As finished, the total length of the main tunnel and the 
laterals is 33,315 feet, or about six and a third miles. 
There are longer and more expensive tunnels, but the 
reasons that make the Sutro Tunnel a remarkable 
achievement will appear in the further course of this 
narrative. 

As soon as the Tunnel act passed Congress, Mr. 
Sutro laid the project before leading American capi- 
talists. He finally obtained pledges to take three mil- 
lion dollars in stock, provided the Comstockers them- 
selves would do (Something. Eeturning to ISTevada 
and California, he pressed the scheme upon the mining 
companies with such energy that they subscribed six 
hundred thousand dollars, and granted him another 
year in which to complete negotiations for the three 
million dollars. J^ever was a project more unanimously 
supported by press and people, by labourers and capi- 
talists, as the Sutro Tunnel scheme between the autumn 
of 1864 and the spring of 1867. 

The reasons for this general support were very sim- 
ple. The entire community followed the lead of the 
mine owners, managers, and chief speculators of the 
Comstock, who were supreme in politics, in social life, 
and in business. These owners and speculators had 
become persuaded of the need of a tunnel, and were 
inclined to become part owners in the enterprise so 



198 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

as to share the expected profits in royalties and new 
veins to be discovered on the line of the tunnel. Be- 
sides, the mines were not pa}ing well, most of them 
were in borrasca, and if that continued long it would 
become necessary to reduce expenses in every possible 
way. 

Suddenly came a thunderbolt falling from cloud- 
less skies. The Bank of California s}TLdicate, now all- 
powerful on the Comstock, changed its corporate mind, 
cancelled the subscriptions of its various companies, 
and issued a decree of financial outlawry against Sutro. 
The tunnel, it was said, could not be constructed — at 
least not by Sutro, nor by liis friends. He was too in- 
dependent and altogether outside of the controlling 
forces on the lode. A telegram was sent to the Xevada 
senatoi^, Xye and Stewart, at Washington, saying, 
" We are opposed to the Sutro Tunnel project and de- 
sire it defeated." This was signed by William Sharon 
and most of the prominent mine owners, managers, 
and speculators. Senator Stewart instantly resigned 
the presidency of the Tunnel Company. Virginia 
City merchants and citizens began to fight the tunnel 
scheme. Thus Sutro's bright prospects of obtaining 
a million dollars in San Francisco, besides the money 
promised on the Comstock, were ruined in an hour. 
Ever}^here, with telegraphic swiftness, active, aggres- 
sive opposition was raised. When the smoke of the 
first tumultuous assault cleared away, all men saw that 
Sutro stood alone, unsupported, while against him in 
organized and well-equipped array were the hostile 
companies, the hostile Bank of California, and the 
hostile mining and speculating communities of Cali- 
fornia and Xevada. 

It was a strange and unexpected situation. Only 
one man out of ten thousand would have attempted 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 199 

another stroke; hardly one out of a million conld have 
conquered his foes. Every pledge from New York 
capitalists was of course nullified. He had to raise 
between four and five million dollars for a pur- 
pose that the very persons to be benefited declared 
against their interests. He had to prove to investors 
that the Comstockers did not know their own business. 
He had to counteract in the newspapers, in legislatures, 
and in Congress itself the persistent assaults of men 
and associations possessing almost boundless resources 
— social, political, and financial. 

Sutro, however, lived for but one object — to dig 
his "coyote hole," as the contemptuous opposition 
termed it. He went to I:^ew York and again tried to 
obtain capital; he went to Europe and saw the princes 
of finance. Men of science approved of his plan, but 
everywhere a warning against his tunnel seemed to 
forerun his coming. Undismayed, he appealed again to 
Congress, secured the attention of the Committee on 
Mines and Mining, and actually had a bill reported 
recommending that the Government should loan five 
million dollars to the Tunnel Company, taldng a mort- 
gage on its property. The impeachment of Andrew 
Johnson, soon after, prevented this bill from coming 
to a vote. All this time the fight went on in news- 
papers and pamphlets throughout the length and 
breadth of the land, but chiefly on the Pacific coast. 
Sutro answered every thrust with a parry and return. 

Said Sutro in conversation years after: "x\h! it 
was a hard thing to see so many old friends in Virginia 
City and San Francisco actually afraid to be seen talk- 
ing to me after the fiat had gone forth that I was to 
be crushed. But I kept on fighting. There was one 
time, I remember, when T had to go to Washington 
to save my interests from destruction. I had no money 



200 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

left. All the profits of my mill had been swallowed 
up. I had a town lot in a little California town, and 
I sold it for two hundred dollars. With that I managed 
to get to Washington. I staid there, somehow, all 
y/inter, poor as I was; I fought my enemies and I came 
out ahead. But they wrote to all the newspapers that 
I had bribed Congress — out of my two hundred dol- 
lars! " 

At last, in sheer desperation, Sutro turned to the 
working miners of the Comstock. He hired Piper's 
Opera House in Virginia City and addressed them with 
bitter eloquence, every stroke of which went home. 
He denounced the unchecked avarice of the men who 
ruled the Bank of California and the famous Mining 
and Milling syndicate. What did they care for the 
toilers? What enterprise that tended to loosen their 
grip on every industry in ^N'evada could fail to gain 
their hatred? He went on to contrast, in brief, ter- 
rible sentences, the disasters from heat and fire to which 
the selfishness of these capitalists subjected them with 
the comfort and safety which the tunnel would afford. 
The increased profits under the tunnel system must 
also, he said, enable the mine owners to continue the 
Union scale of wages without protest for generations 
to come. 

Sutro added immeasurably to the force of his ap- 
peal by showing to the miners, and afterward circulat- 
ing among them, rude but effective campaign cartoons. 
One cartoon represented a rich speculator driving six 
fast horses and covering a working miner with con- 
temptuous dust; another showed ^^Bill Sharon's big 
wood pile " ; and still another " Bill Sharon's crooked 
railroad,'^ so as to emphasize the fact that the Bank of 
California syndicate controlled the transportation and 
owned the forests. Still other cartoons illustrated 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 201 

with ferocious sarcasm many a well-known instance 
of careless disregard of tlie health and lives of the Corn- 
stock miners. 

The series closed with a huge double cartoon that 
Milton might have conceived and Dore might have 
executed. A few months before there had been a fire 
in the Yellow Jacket mine and forty-two miners had 
lost their lives. It was an awful disaster; the terror 
of it still dwelt in the homes of the Comstock. Fire 
was yet smouldering in the drifts of the mines and 
likely to burst forth again, when Sutro sent forth his 
double cartoon, headed The Yellow Jacket Fire. On 
one side was a shaft a thousand feet deep full of burn- 
ing and falling ladders, timbers, and machinery, a vor- 
tex of whirling smoke and flame, with hundreds of 
miners trying to escape and tumbling headlong into 
the depths; wives, mothers, and children were running 
to the mouth of the shaft or sinking in despair on the 
ground. In the other half of the picture was a similar 
shaft on fire, but with the Sutro Tunnel connection 
below, and the miners escaping to meet their wives 
and children. 

Here are some sentences from Sutro's speech: " Will 
the people of ITevada see me crushed out now? Will 
you not see fair play when one man has the pluck to 
stand up against a crowd ? Come in together; let three 
thousand labouring men pay in an average of ten dol- 
lars a month and insure the construction of the tunnel, 
carrying with it the control of the mines." Again: 
" The enemy who has spun his web around you until 
you are almost helpless has bribed your judges, packed 
your juries, hired false witnesses, bought legislatures, 
elected representatives to defend their iniquity, im- 
posed taxes upon you for their private benefit, and now 
dares you to expose or oppose them. ... I do not mean 



202 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

to incite you to any violence, . . . but I do mean to 
say that you can destroy your enemy by simple concert 
of action. Let all of you join together to build the 
Sutro Tunnel; that is the way to reach them. . . . 
They know that the first pick struck into the tunnel 
will be the first pick into their graves." 

Thus, with tremendous invective, Sutro carried 
the war into Africa and laughed to scorn the shouts 
of " Demagogue! " that went up from the justly alarmed 
capitalists. He caused such a storm that in a short time 
he had to use all his personal influence to prevent an 
outbreak. But the Miners' Union raised fifty thousand 
dollars by subscription and put it into Tunnel Company 
stock. This enabled the resolute Sutro to break ground 
October 19, 1869. He now had to provide means for 
continuing work. He had to fight his opponents in "Ne- 
vada, California, Washington, 'New York, and Europe. 
It was necessary, too, that this fight should be aggres- 
sive; he must have more money. In 1870 he obtained 
the promise of two million dollars in France, but the 
Franco-Prussian War destroyed this combination. In 
1871 he persuaded Congress to appoint a commission 
of United States engineers to examine the Comstock ■ 
and the plans of the tunnel. They reported in the main 
unfavourably. Such a report, if sustained by the Com- 
mittee on Mines and Mining, could only lead to one 
end — the revoking of the franchise. Sutro, as usual, 
rose to the occasion, and forthwith succeeded in per- 
suading the committee that the report was biased by 
his opponents; the committee reversed their first de- 
cision and advocated a loan of two million dollars by 
the United States. This bill was finally defeated, but 
its very presentation in Congress was a victory for 
Sutro. Even his enemies began to yield unwilling 
admiration to his bulldog tenacity. " That little Ger- 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 203 

man Jew will undermine the Comstock" became a 
saying among the capitalists. 

In September, 1871, Sutro won his way to the purses 
of some English investors and obtained $1,450,000. 
This was afterward increased in America to a total of 
two million dollars. Immediately four hundred men 
were set at work in the tunnel and upon four working 
and ventilation shafts. Machinery was bought, shops 
and dwellings sprang up like mushrooms around the 
waste heaps, and the renewed energies of this volcanic 
man were concentrated upon a race against the Com- 
stock mine owners who were fast approaching the level 
of the tunnel. 

There was no time set by the act of Congress or any 
obligation of the company for the completion of the 
tunnel, but the general understanding was that the 
main line should be finished in three and a quarter 
years. This was based upon the calculations of the en- 
gineers, who proposed to work from four shafts as well 
as from the end of the tunnel, thus making nine sepa- 
rate stopes or headings besides some work that might 
be possible by drifting from the Comstock lode. But 
when these four shafts were begun, such torrents of 
water poured out of the porous rock that no machinery 
could be obtained to keep the two nearest the lode clear 
enough to work in; the other two, though finally sunk 
to the tunnel level, were often rendered useless from 
the same cause. Hand drills were used at first, and 
the rate of progress was slow; it would have required 
seven or eight years for the completion of the main tun- 
nel. Besides, the increase of heat was extraordinary', 
and the atmosphere grew so bad at the face of the head- 
ing that competent authorities have doubted whether 
the tunnel would ever have been completed if the costly 
and complicated power drills just beginning to come 



204 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

into use at Mount Cenis and elsewhere had not been 
greatly improved by American inventors. Burleigh 
and IngersoU drills soon changed the aspect of affairs. 
An interesting comparison made at this time between 
a famous Freiburg tunnel, the Eothschonberger Stol- 
len, and the Sutro, is as follows: The German tunnel 
was advancing by handwork in gneiss rock from a single 
heading about twenty-six feet a month; the Nevada 
tunnel was advancing in andesite from a single heading 
one hundred and five feet a month. When power drills 
were introduced the advance of the German work in- 
creased to eighty-four feet, while that of the iSTevada 
enterprise rose to three hundred and ten feet. The 
monthly advance of the Sutro Tunnel during 1875 
and 1876 maintained an average of three hundred and 
eight feet, an unequalled record that attracted the at- 
tention of mining engineers, who declared that Su- 
tro's " coyote hole " was the greatest undertaking in 
America. 

Meanwhile the working miners of the Comstock 
were fighting their old enemies — ^^vater, heat, and lack 
of ventilation — and hoping for the com.pletion of the 
tunnel. Mining superintendents, who still claimed that 
they needed no help from Sutro, were forced to ac- 
knowledge that the water plague was almost more than 
they could endure. " To chronicle such a contest," 
wrote one observer, "is to write down an unvaried 
record of flooded shafts and levels, of temporary drain- 
age and new inbursts of water, or, more discouraging 
still, of broken pumps and of delusive gains, when 
the battle was really a drawn one and the pumps could 
only hold the rising water in check." The cost of 
pumping on the Ophir was seventy-two thousand dol- 
lars a year. 

So matters progressed through the days of the 



THE SUTRO TUNNEL. 205 

Crown Point bonanza and the early days of the greater 
marvels of Consolidated Virginia and California — the 
mine owners steadily declaring that they would never 
use the tunnel; Sutro and his men hammering on 
beneath the mountain. Never v/ere men and machinery 
handled with greater skill; picked miners in short 
shifts drove the advancing drills every moment of day 
and night and every day in the week; skilled timber- 
men propped the tunnel; young athletes threw frag- 
ments of hot rock into iron tram cars; long trains 
of mules and cars went to and fro under swinging lan- 
terns. "Taster! Taster!^' cried Sutro to his willing 
workers; " every ton of ore taken from the bonanza 
loses our company two dollars! " 

In 1873 the temperature at the face of the tunnel 
was only 72° Fahr. It rose to 83° the next year, to 
90° in 1876, to 96° in January, 1878, and to 109° in 
April. This was in spite of the most powerful blowers 
to be obtained which were used to force fresh air into 
the tunnel. The heading was nearing the Comstock 
lode and its solfataric springs. The lamps burned 
dimly; workmen at the front fainted at their posts. 
Another danger threatened them. Portions of the 
tunnel crumbled and fell, crushing the supports in 
places, and only constant vigilance and labour pre- 
vented a catastrophe which might have crushed the air 
pipes and killed every man at the heading. The work- 
men were two miles from the nearest ventilation shaft 
when this terrific heat was encountered, and it grew 
worse till the face of the rock showed a temperature 
of 114°. After May, 1878, two or three hours of work 
were all that the strongest and most experienced 
miners could endure. The mules often refused to 
enter the tunnel, and they were dragged by main 
strength from the air-escapes. It was evident that en- 



206 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

durance was being strained to its utmost capacity. Man 
after man dropped down on the rocky floor and was car- 
ried to the surface, babbling and incoherent, to slowly 
recover from the poisonous air. 

At last the miners in the Savage heard the blasts 
of Sutro's approaching tunnel, and then the blows of 
the power drills. On July 8, 1878, Sutro himself, half 
naked, like one of his miners, toiled at the front, and 
toward night, when the final blast tore a jagged hole 
through the wall of rock, he crawled through the open- 
ing, " overcome with excitement," as one of the news- 
papers said. The rush of hot air and smoke from the 
tunnel was almost unbearable to the men working in 
the cooler Savage drifts; clouds of dust, fine rock, 
and impurities, gathered in the tunnel during the 
nearly nine years that had passed since its commence- 
ment, shot upward through the shaft of the Savage. 

The immediate goal was now attained, but a firm 
treaty of peace between the contending parties was 
essential. Most of the mine owners still said that they 
did not need the tunnel, and refused to stand by their 
contracts. A crisis came in 1879 when the Hale and 
Norcross pump broke and water began to flood sev- 
eral mines. The superintendents immediately turned 
the flow from the remaining pumps into the tunnel, 
driving out the workmen. Sutro began to put in 
a water-tight bulkhead. Either open war or a law- 
suit carried eventually into the Supreme Court appeared 
the only alternatives. 

Fortunately for all concerned, wiser counsels pre- 
vailed, and new agreements, which bound every com- 
pany on the lode, were entered into. A thousand work- 
men began to cut a drain channel five feet wide down 
the middle of the tunnel floor, and by July it was in 
full use. The temperature of the water, even at the 



THE SUTKO TUNNEL. 207 

mouth of the tunnel, was never below 100° Fahr., and 
it often entered the tunnel at 130° and even 160°. The 
amount of flow in 1880 was not less than 1,300,000,000 
gallons, and as other mines began to use the tunnel, 
the total annual drainage rose at times to nearly or 
quite two billion gallons. When work is again at- 
tempted on the lowest levels of the Comstock, for years 
left idle, the value of the Sutro Tunnel will be even 
more evident. 

At the time of the completion of the tunnel the 
leading mines were using more powerful pumping 
machinery than had ever been applied to such pur- 
poses. Perhaps the power required in these engines 
is best shown by the size of the wooden pump-rods. 
Formerly made 12 by 12 inches, they were now made 
14 by 16 inches, of sections of the best selected Oregon 
pine strapped together by iron plates, yet breakages 
were frequent. The Belcher pump-rod broke twelve 
times in eight months. It is estimated that the cost 
of handling the water in 1880 was three million dollars, 
even with the aid of the tunnel. 

When his victory was complete, Sutro retired from 
the control of the tunnel, selling his stock at a high 
price and removing to San Francisco, and became one 
of the foremost citizens of California. He knew 
ISTevada and the Comstock better than most men of 
his time, for he had been a part of the whole dramatic 
and eventful story ever since 1860. After twenty 
years devoted with singular courage and ability to a 
single purpose, that purpose had rounded into well- 
wrought achievement, and when he left the Comstock 
he was one of the most widely known men in America. 

Even after Sutro left the Comstock his memorable 
'* coyote hole " continued to share the fortunes, good 
or ill, of the great lode it drained. According to the 



208 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

report of Mr. Theodore Sutro, in 1887 the main tunnel 
had cost in round figures $3,500,000, and the laterals 
had brought this sum up to $5,000,000. What was 
considered in 1879 one of the larger possibilities of 
the tunnel has never been developed. Its friends con- 
stantly spoke of the " facilities which the tunnel af- 
forded for the extracting and smelting of millions of 
tons of low-grade ore ^^ which lay partly exposed to 
view in the two hundred miles of shafts and galleries, 
and partly still concealed in the depths of the Corn- 
stock mines. This ore was passed by in those days, 
though worth ten or twelve dollars a ton, because by 
the methods employed — the mills, the railroad, the 
hoisting works — it could not be worked at a profit. 
The Sutro Tunnel Company still claims that by water- 
power mills on the Carson this low-grade ore can be 
worked at six or eight dollars a ton, thus building up 
a new industry without injuring the towns on the Com- 
stock. Unfortunately, the plan has never received a 
full and fair test. Though the tunnel company is said 
to have a great deal of low-grade ore in its own terri- 
tory, lack of means has prevented thorough exploration 
of its resources, as well as the building of reduction 
works. The tunnel, like the great lode, has long been 
in borrasca. 



CHAPTER XYIII. 

OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MmE. 

All this time, while describing pioneer life, early 
settlement, the bonanzas, the Sutro Tunnel, and many 
other episodes of the long story of the Comstock, one 
has necessarily made passing allusions to the build- 
ings and machinery on the surface of the ground, and 
to the still more interesting details of the inside 
workings of the great mines on the lode. So much 
remains to be told, however, respecting the appearance 
of a mine of the first rank, " on deck " and " between 
decks,'' that this chapter and that which follows are 
devoted to mines and mine equipment as they appear 
at times of especial activity and high organization. 

When a visitor goes to the Comstock he sees the 
ruins of many old mine buildings no longer in use, be- 
cause much larger and more complete structures over 
the later shafts have taken their place. Of the more 
important large shafts there were twenty-four in 1880, 
several of them huge combination shafts used by more 
than one mine. The surface of the lode is so irregular 
that the altitudes of the tops of the shafts vary to an 
extent that would be surprising anywhere except in 
such a wild mountain region; the highest shaft. Bul- 
lion, begins 6,307 feet above the sea, and the lowest, 
the old Overman, begins 5,731 feet above the sea, show- 
ing a difference of 53G feet on the lode — enough to 
make quite a hill on a Western prairie. The surface 



210 THE STORY OF THE ^MIXE. 

workings of the Comstock are on the side of a moun- 
tain furrowed by immense ravines, where men have, 
with marvellous persistence and energy, hewn out or 
built up, on terraces supported by masonry, sufficient 
room for mine and mill buildings. 

Any one of the great mines when in active opera- 
tion will serve as a type of the general plan of outside 
works, the result of thirty years of experience under 
Comstock conditions. JSTothing better can be found 
in the way of concrete illustration than the works 
grouped about California and Consolidated Virginia 
with the old shafts, the new combination shafts, the 
mills, yards, railroad tracks, trestle works, machinery, 
and all that so well represents the modern industry of 
mining. What one sees at the main works is a very 
large mass of liigh buildings, partly on the level, partly 
terraced down the slope, and still further complicated 
by wings, annexes, and various additions — all thor- 
oughly well made and painted with fire-proof paint. 
Surrounding the whole and between the wings and 
additions are piles of iron, lumber, cord wood, separate 
buildings, and vast collections of supplies of every 
imaginable sort. 

The main mass of buildings resembles nothing so 
much as the union of several large foundries and manu- 
factories. A row of tall smokestacks steadied by steel 
cables mark the location of the engines, the blacksmith 
shops, and the machine shops. As one goes around 
the yards and the vast structures full of life and ac- 
tivity, the passing impression varies; here are flat steel 
cables woven or twisted, copper wire, steel bars, and 
hardware in a thousand forms; yonder are supplies 
enough, one would think, to stock a street full of whole- 
sale houses. There is a powder house; there are 
offices for clerks and superintendents and a build- 



OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 211 

ing where bullion is melted and assaying is done; 
there are also rooms for the surveyors, draughtsmen, 
and civil engineers. But there is no mine in sight any- 
where. 

Some idea of the variety of articles that come under 
the general head of supplies and are gathered together 
in the storehouses here may be obtained from a few 
notes of purchases made by a single mine (California) 
in 1877, when over $315,000 was spent for miscellane- 
ous supplies and over $547,000 for fuel and for the 
timbers and iron used in the new shaft then being 
sunk. The "regular supplies" stored up and used 
above ground or sent down into the mines as required 
included the following large items: Timber, over 
10,000,000 feet, costing about $224,000; ice, nearly 
2,000,000 pounds, costing about $22,000; powder to 
the value of $17,000; candles worth $16,000; steel 
and iron, $5,000. 

If we take the total expense account of the same 
mine for that year (1877), we obtain, perhaps, a more 
striking impression of the scale of operations. Sup- 
plies, as we have seen, were used to the value of about 
$315,000; salaries and wages came to about $788,000; 
cost of reduction was $2,220,000; of hoisting, $186,- 
000; and of assaying, $53,000. Office expenses, team- 
ing, surveying, taxes, litigation, and miscellaneous 
items, added to the above, bring the total to consider- 
ably more than $4,000,000. In such a mine the value 
of the outside works is nearly impossible to determine, 
for it is constantly changing. If there is no mill at- 
tached, half a million dollars would be a low estimate; 
complete reduction works add as much more to the 
total. 

Everywhere, in the first view of a mine, lumber, 
firewood, and machinery are the most striking features. 
15 



212 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

The depths of the mine in the last thirty years have 
swallowed up fully 800,000,000 feet of timher— 
enough, if sawed into boards and scantlings, to con- 
struct forty thousand two-story houses of six rooms 
each. These would provide homes for two hundred 
thousand people. If the consumption of lumber had 
always been at the rate of such bonanza years as 1875 
and 1876, the Comstock lode would now contain near- 
ly three times as much lumber as this buried in its 
shafts and drifts, or sufficient for the homes of six hun- 
dred thousand people. Hundreds of square miles of 
forest have been cut to supply this inexorable demand, 
and every foot of timber used has been hauled to Gold 
Hill or Virginia City and piled in the lumber yards 
at the works. 

The fuel used during the past thirty years has 
aggregated something like three million cords. It con- 
sists for the most part of yellow pine, pitch pine, tama- 
rack, and fir, and vast tiers of it lie piled up at all 
seasons. In 1880 the Sierra l^evada furnaces used 
about sixteen thousand cords of wood, and four other 
mines used more than ten thousand cords apiece. Such 
a mine keeps six months' supply of fuel on hand, and 
even a smaller mine always has five hundred cords 
piled in the yard. 

The machinery is of so many different types and is 
constantly undergoing so many changes, repairs, and 
improvements, that the foundries and machine shops 
at the mouth of a mine often seem as if they had been 
transplanted bodily to the Comstock from some large 
seaport. The immense power of the pumping engines 
has been noticed, but the total horse power repre- 
sented by all the engines used on the Comstock affords 
a still better measure of the work done. The mines 
in 1880 had engines of a combined capacity of 21,000 



OUTSIDE VIEW OP A MINE. 213 

horse power. Single mines have had 3,000, and even 
3,000 horse power in use at times. 

Outside of each of the vast structures is a pile of 
waste rock, the dump of the hidden mine. This is 
perhaps the most peculiar feature of the place, and 
if the mine that supplies it is of the first ranJi, the size 
of the pile is mountainous. A part of the waste roclc 
sometimes goes to make acres of level ground on which 
to place the mine huildings and the quartz mill, hut 
there is so much left to he poured down into the canons 
that the sum total is really one of the most impressive 
things ahout Virginia City. Cars run out upon a track 
extending from the huilding far over the middle of 
the dump, and are emptied automatically. They flash 
back and forth all day, all night, every day in the week, 
and the waste rock and debris slide slowly to the bot- 
tom of the great dusty pyramid, on which no green leaf 
ever grows. Such a pile, much smaller, and of saw- 
dust instead of broken rock, the lumber mills make 
along the Mendocino coast; but always these latter 
smoke and blacken with an ever-smouldering fire that 
burns unquenched for decades, and always the wild 
flowers of the forest grow in the very edges of the 
fragrant hills of sawdust. In strange contrast, the 
waste rock mountains of the Comstock are without 
life, colour, sound, or change, except the rattle of bits 
of porphyry and the sharp sunlight gleaming on 
whitening clays and splinters of stone piled on barren 
hollows above the sage brush. 

The central building over the mouth of the large 
shaft sunk in partnership by the Cahfornia and 
Consolidated Virginia mines, is high, steep-roofed 
and large, heavily framed, floored solidly and well, 
open to the roof forty and fifty feet above, and in every 
respect suited to the requirements. Men — dozens of 



214 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

them — quiet, busy men dressed in woollen shirts, small 
felt hats or caps, and blue overalls, are directing and 
operating affairs. Those whose duties do not take 
them down into the mines are in ordinary citizen's 
clothes. From the middle of the floor, through a row 
of four square openings, white columns of steam often 
rush upward in huge volumes rolling to the roof; it 
is the breath of the mines below, and in cold weather 
the warm lower levels send up these whirling clouds. 
The four openings are the tops of the four compart- 
ments of the shaft, which is not only hned on every 
side with square timbers, but is still further divided 
by perpendicular partitions. The timbering leaves 
these lesser parallel shafts about five feet square, and 
one is occupied by the pipes of the pumping machinery, 
while the other three are hoisting compartments. 

This is the top of the mine; through these small 
shafts the business of the mine is carried on. The 
cages that move up and down may be compared to hotel 
elevators, only in this case the hotel is from fifteen 
hundred to three thousand feet high and pushed down 
into the ground so that everjrthing except the roof is 
out of sight. The elevators begin at the roof and go 
down to the basement, past floor after floor, station 
after station, passageway after passageway, until the 
place is reached where another cellar is being hewed 
out. 

Some sixty feet from the steaming shaft top is a 
large, square platform raised several feet above the 
floor. Here, on frames of massive timbers built upon 
solid rock and filled in with cement, are the hoisting 
engines; here the engineers sit under a placard some- 
thing like this: "ISTo person allowed on the platform, 
or to speak to the engineers." There is reason enough 
for the warning, for the lives of many men are in the 



OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 215 

hands of the engineer and his assistants. These mine 
engineers are strong, modest, manly — much such men 
as are in similar places of responsibility in the engine 
rooms of a Cunarder. 

Before the face of each engineer is a large "in- 
dicator'' like a clock, or sometimes in the form of a 
cyhnder, which shows exactly where the cage is; be- 
side it is the bell by which he communicates with the 
officers and workmen on the different levels of the 
mine. He stops and starts the cage, " slows up,'' goes 
ahead at full speed, receives word about the contents 
of the cage, and many other important matters. Safety 
cages are now used, similar in construction to the ele- 
vators in large buildings but much heavier, and one 
source of accident is thus removed. The mouth of 
each compartment that opens through the floor of 
the main building is closely covered with an iron grat- 
ing which each cage lifts as it comes up, and the place 
is sometimes still further protected by a railing, so 
that few accidents occur at the top of a mine except 
through careless engineers. 

The power of the hoisting engine is necessarily 
great. At the Yellow Jacket the two hoisting engines 
are each of 1,000 horse power. The main engine at 
the California and Consolidated Virginia shaft, every- 
where known as the "C. & C," is of 2,000 horse power; 
it lifts a cage with two cars of rock and handles a passen- 
ger cage at the same time. What would be called an 
average cable at one of these great mines is made of steel 
wire, woven flat, seven inches wide and five eighths of an 
inch thick; the pulleys are forty or fifty feet above 
the shaft mouth on a cross-beam supported by a very 
large and massive frame which is built around the 
mouth of the shaft and is called the " gallows-frame." 

There are two kinds of cable reels. In some cases 



216 THE STORY OP THE MINE. 

tlie cable is coiled directly upon a short reel; in other 
cases a drum is used. The latter is known as the taper- 
ing hoisting reel, which is a drum of very heavy wood 
turning with a wrought-iron shaft sixteen inches in 
diameter. On this base beam after beam has been 
bolted until the result is a structure fifteen feet long, 
thirteen feet in diameter at one end and twenty-two 
feet at the other. On the outside of the truncated cone 
thus obtained iron plates are bolted, and a deep spiral 
groove is made from end to end in the iron to guide 
and steady the cable as it winds and unwinds. The 
wrought-iron shaft turns in a framework that reaches 
quite through the floor of the building, and is sunk 
deep in solid rock and braced against every strain. 

A steel cable such as is used on the Comstock weighs 
from twenty-five thousand to forty thousand pounds. 
In the case of those that taper regularly toward the 
lower end, where less strength is needed, the reduced 
size is not obtained by leaving out some wires, but by 
gradually tapering each wire in its manufacture. The 
flat cables are much preferred for heavier work, and 
were first made by Mr. A. S. Hallidie, of San Francisco, 
the inventor of the cable system of street cars so much 
in use in that city. 

The engineers of the Comstock greatly increased 
the efficiency of their steam engines, so as to save fuel. 
The valve gear on compound engines was greatly 
changed. The hoisting engines were made to act 
directly upon the cables by keying the reel to the main 
shaft, increasing the possible speed with which the 
cables could be hoisted to three thousand feet per 
minute, a rate ten times greater than the utmost speed 
attainable before 1865. 

Danger seems inseparable from such machinery. 
If an engineer loses his presence of mind for a second 




The Mouth of a Shaft. 



OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 217 

while guiding the sv»dft-flying eage^ the men may be 
hurled to destrnction. At the Union shaft, in 1879, 
the engineer, a careful and temperate man, was hoist- 
ing a cage with seventeen men from the bottom of the 
shaft; when they were near the top he started to shut 
off steam, but turned the lever the wrong way and the 
cage shot swiftly into sight. Losing his head entirely, 
the poor engineer threw the valve still farther over, 
and the cage, leaping upward, gleaming and terrible, 
struck the timbers of the gallows frame and snapped 
the seven-inch cable, which " parted like twine,^^ mak- 
ing a report like the sound of a cannon. The cable 
flew backward and swung on one side, mowing down 
timbers and machinery as far as it could reach. It 
was like that most tremendous accident known on ship- 
board, the breaking loose of a gun amidships. The 
great building shook to the granite foundations, and 
men cried out that one of the boilers had exploded. 
When the cage struck, every man except two who clung 
to the shattered frame, and one who seized the bell 
rope, were hurled against the roof and fell dead, dying, 
or crippled on the floor. 

One must not expect to see a close-walled box or 
steel cage for an elevator. The miners have only a 
heavy iron cage, entirely open on two sides and nearly 
so on the others. Some cages are single; some have 
two floors and are called double-deckers. The old- 
style three- and four-deckers have now gone out of use. 
Loaded iron cars come out of the depths and are at once 
hooked to a cable that pulls them from the cage along 
a track on the floor of the building, or they are rolled 
out by men in waiting. If the contents are worthless, 
the cars are quickly switched to the dumps and so dis- 
appear; if they consist of ore for the mill, they go to 
one of the most important and complicated of all the 



218 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

huge structures that cluster around the mouth of a 
Comstock mine. 

The Consolidated Virginia mill as built in bonanza 
days has sixty stamps of eight hundred pounds each, 
forty pans, four agitators, and twenty settlers, and is 
capable of reducing two hundred and fifty tons of ore 
daily. The California mill has eighty stamps of nine 
hundred and eighty-four pounds each, forty-six pans, 
four agitators, and twenty settlers, and can work three 
hundred and eighty tons daily. The sixty-stamp Con- 
solidated Virginia mill is a good type of the more mod- 
ern improved work of the Comstock. Let us follow 
the course of an ore car from the mouth of the shaft 
and see what happens to it. 

This mill is built near the rest of the main struc- 
ture on a lower level. A car track nearly three hundred 
feet long leads straight from the mouth of the shaft 
in the main building to the roof of the quartz mill. 
It is supported forty-five feet in the air on trestle- 
work, and is boarded over its whole length with rows 
of windows on each side, so that it " resembles nothing 
else so much as a ropewalk.'^ The ore cars are made 
up into little trains and hauled to the top of the mill 
by mules. One of the famous mules in bonanza days 
was known far and wide as "Mary Ann Simpson.'* 
Tradition had it that she knew more about mill work 
than any man employed in the mine, and she had cer- 
tainly hauled millions of dollars from shaft mouth to 
mill. In some mines the ore is carried by an endless 
belt in buckets on a cable, or the cars are drawn by a 
cable run by a shaft from an engine. 

When dumped, the ore falls into chutes in the roof 
of the mill, and what the Californian hydraulic miners 
first named " grizzlies '' are set in the bottom of each 
chute. A grizzly is a screen of parallel iron bars three 



OUTSIDE VIEW OF A MINE. 219 

inches apart, in most cases, set sloping, and loose at 
one end, so that while the finer rock goes through, 
all larger fragments roll into the jaws of a rock breaker, 
whence, after having been sufiiciently crushed, the 
material goes through another chute into the main 
ore bins to which the smaller rocks went at once. In 
the hydraulic mines, where sets of grizzlies are some- 
times used to keep boulders out of the flumes, the 
mingled roar of the foaming waters, the harsh crash- 
ing of rolling rocks, and the clang of quivering bars 
of massive iron can be heard a long distance. It is one 
of the noisiest things about such a mine, but its name 
does not seem very appropriately taken from the mon- 
arch of the Sierran wilderness, whose tread, though 
lumbering, is noiseless, and whose loudest utterance 
is a menacing growl. 

Eeturning to our typical mill on the Comstock, 
the ore bin where the crushed rock falls is one hundred 
and ten feet long and the contents are fed by chutes 
to the eight batteries of ten stamps each. The mill 
building stands upon ground that was terraced in the 
most careful manner, so that the different parts of 
the structure stands upon different levels, as is required 
for the most perfect economy of labour and time. After 
the ore is once delivered at the top of the building, 
gravity is made to do as much work as possible. 

Beginning with the power required to run a mill 
of this type, it is primarily a 600-horse-power compound 
condensing engine. There are two cylinders, one of 
twenty-four by forty-eight inches and the other forty- 
eight by forty-eight inches; steam which goes into the 
initial or smaller cylinder, cut off at the half stroke, 
goes into the expansion cylinder, where it fills eight 
times the bulk it first had. Instead of going into the 
air, it then exhausts into a condenser which is so 



220 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

arranged as to counterbalance tlie atmospheric pressure 
at the altitude of Virginia City. In ways like this the 
ponderous machinery of the Comstock is all adapted 
by a host of details to suit exactly the work and the 
locality. The main shaft of the engine is fourteen 
inches in diameter, weighing fifteen thousand pounds. 
The fly wheel, eighteen feet across, weighs thirty-three 
thousand pounds, xi belt from the fly wheel, which 
is also a band wheel, drives the stamps in the batteries. 
A long shaft eleven inches in diameter goes into the 
amalgamating room and drives the machinery of the 
pans and settlers. The engine itself weighs fifty tons 
and rests on sohd masonry. There are eight boilers, 
each sixteen feet long and fifty-four inches in diameter, 
and four huge smokestacks, each ninety feet high, ex- 
tending forty feet above the roof. 

The progress of the ore from the ore bin, under 
the stamps, through the amalgamating room, to the 
retort house, and finally to the melting room, where 
the refined metal is cast into bars of bullion, would 
require many chapters full of technical details which 
properly belong to metallurgical treatises. It may be 
noted in passing that there is a great deal of gold in 
all the Comstock ore, but the quantity varies in dif- 
ferent mines and at different levels. In the whole lode 
the average amount of gold is about forty-two per cent, 
but the Gold Hill group contains forty-seven per cent 
of gold in its total jield to date, and in some single 
mines the gold has been nearly sixty per cent. 

The forty-six mining companies of the Comstock 
in 1866 had forty-four engines, of a total horse power 
of 1,500, used for pumping and hoisting, and sixty- 
two mills run by steam and water power, with 1,271 
stamps crusliing 57,112 tons of ore each month. Fif- 
teen years later (in 1881) the total horse power of all 



OUTSIDE VIEW OP A MINE. 221 

the engines on the lode was nearly 21,000, and it has 
not materially increased since that time. When all the 
energies of the men of the Comstock are again directed 
to going deeper there will have to be another great 
advance in the machinery used, and the inventive skill 
of the world will be taxed to its utmost. If new and 
greater bonanzas are found, the mills themselves will 
be reconstructed upon a larger scale. 

We leave the deafening clang and clatter of the 
mills and turn back to the main building. We have 
seen the progress of the ore from the top of the shaft 
to the retorts and the assay office. It is time to descend 
into the mine itself, where the iron ore cars are being 
filled and pushed along underground rails to the 
station. It is time to study life in the chain of sub- 
terranean cities of the Comstock. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE CITY rXDEEGEOUND. 

At last we are ready to study at its best the great 
subterranean city, the chain of works for whose main- 
tenance and extension, mills, machinery, and towns on 
the surface were created. We are ready to go down 
the main shaft, stop at a " station," explore a drift, 
see the miners at work, and hear stories of peril and 
adventure. 

The visitor retires to a dressing room, takes off his 
or her ordinary clothing, puts on one of the suits kept 
there for the purpose — flannel pantaloons, woollen 
shirt, heavy shoes, and felt hat — ^is placed in charge 
of a foreman, and they enter the cage. The foreman 
waves his hand; in an instant we are dropping noise- 
lessly into the darkness, lit only by the flickering rays, 
of a lantern which shows timbers seemingly leaping 
upward. 

Pretty soon a station appears, but we pass without 
pausing. There seems to be a large irregular room 
opening back from the side of the shaft. Men are 
busy there, moving about in the well-lighted space, 
and there is machinery at work. If we went slower 
we should see a drift extending from the station and 
dividing into many other passages, and miners and 
foreman would be noticed passing to and fro engaged 
in various occupations. Every hundred feet a station 
223 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 223 

flashes past, and the immensity of the work begins 
to grow upon the traveller. 

Sometimes the man in charge of a station hails us 
as we pass, and the foreman makes a reply that is 
Choctaw to the uninitiated, for we are dropping rapidly 
away from the sound. As we reach a depth of a thou- 
sand feet or so the cable sometimes begins to " spring " 
with a peculiarly disagreeable bobbing motion, which 
gives a novice a new sensation, as if hung in an abyss 
by a rubber strap. In the midst of this we come to a 
full stop at the fifteen-hundred-foot station and step 
off on the floor. 

A station is the office for the work done on that 
mining level, as well as the point where men stop and 
where freight is shipped or received. It is walled, 
roofed, and floored with huge timbers and planks, and 
is a large, well-lighted place crowded with mining 
supplies, barrels of ice water, candles, fuse, powder, 
tools, etc. If it were not for a car track which crosses 
the middle of the floor, coming from the level beyond 
and connecting by switches with all the hoisting com- 
partments of the shaft, the place would sometimes seem 
a combination of office and country store. The car 
track that extends through the main drift of the mine 
connects by turntables with the side drifts and cross- 
cuts. Laden cars arrive regularly from the " stopes " 
or places where ore is being taken out, and are sent to 
the surface by the station tender. Empty cars as they 
arrive are returned to some place where they are needed 
by the car men, and so the work goes on steadily, ex- 
cepting when shifts are changed. 

The drifts, or " galleries " as some call them, are 
from four to six feet wide and seven to eight feet high. 
The miners prefer to cut them outside of the vein as 
much as possible, as there is less danger of caves. The 



224 THE STOBY OF THE MINE. 

floor of a drift is liorizontal, or slightly raised, to facili- 
tate the delivery of ore. The main north and south 
drift is the Broadway of the level, and sometimes even 
contains a double car track. The cross-cuts start from 
the main drift at right angles with the vein, so as to 
cut into the ore body if any is found. Like the levels, 
they are about a hundred feet apart. They are ex- 
tended entirely across the lode to the other wall, and 
are connected with each other by cross-drifts. Every 
new cross-cut attracts the attention of all who are in- 
terested in the mine. If one cross-cut is in pay ore 
there is much greater excitement when the next one, 
a hundred feet farther on, is to be opened. In this 
way, with drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts, the skele- 
ton of the underground plan begins to be apparent. 
Imagine a general plan something like this on each 
level, and we only have to describe the winzes to com- 
plete the framework of the passageways. A winze is 
a small shaft sunk wherever it is needed, from one 
level to another, for ventilation, to explore new ground, 
or often, when sloping, to serve as a chute for ore and 
timbers. An "upraise'^ is the beginning of a winze 
started on a level and carried upward toward the next 
higher level. If it is finished its name is changed to 
winze. The only connection between one level and an- 
other besides the main shaft is by means of these winzes. 
Vertical winzes are in reality shafts; sloping winzes 
are inclines; drifts, cross-cuts, and cross-drifts are 
really tunnels. 

The main shaft which connects all these under- 
ground workings is not always vertical, neither does 
it always remain the same for its entire length; it may 
be an "incline," as the Crown Point shaft, which is 
vertical to the eleven-hundred-foot level and then 
follows the lode, which dips thirty-five degrees at that 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 225 

point. The car used for hoisting through an incline 
is a *^ giraffe/^ absurdly called so "because the hind 
wheels are very large and the front ones low, so as to 
keep the car level." One would suppose that the name 
kangaroo would be more appropriate. It carries eight 
tons of ore at a trip. Sometimes another or "back- 
action" car is fastened behind. A ride on a giraffe 
is very exciting. The track is well lighted and the cars 
climb it with the speed of a lightning express. The 
giraffes, like the elevator cages, have safety grips. At 
the bottom of the shaft or incline is the " sump," a pit 
or well sunk there to collect the water from the mine. 
Here are the suction ends of the pumps. 

To have a main shaft presupposes that there are 
some air shafts for ventilation; but there are few on 
the Comstock, ventilation being secured as far as pos- 
sible by connection with the main shafts of other mines. 
The miners agree that the direction of a draught in a 
mine remains permanent for years, but if a fire in a 
mine changes the draught, it never changes back. A 
"down-cast" has thus been changed in an hour to 
an "up-cast." The general tendency of air currents 
in the Comstock is in the same direction as the slope 
of the ore chimneys — that is, southward. Each new 
connection makes changes in the air currents in all 
the mines. 

There is machinery in the mines, and often a great 
deal of it. Steam makes too much heat, but com- 
pressed air, hydraulic power, and electricity are now 
used with entire success. Small engines run the 
"blowers" to force fresh air through pipes to every 
part of the mine, but particularly to the heads of the 
news cuts, drifts, and upraises; others hoist and lower 
rock and other materials in the various winzes, and still 
others drive the drills. All this makes a network of 



226 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

pipes, mostly for compressed air, extending through- 
out the mine. 

The admirable system which prevails is nowhere 
more manifest than in the way men are handled. They 
form in line in the hoisting works and march into the 
cages. They leave the mines in the same way. Three 
shifts of eight hours each make the day of twenty- 
four hours. " Morning shift " is from 7 a. m. to 3 p. m.; 
" afternoon shift " from 3 to 11 p. M., and *^ night 
shift " till 7 again. Each level of the mine has there- 
fore its three shift bosses. The clerk who acts as time- 
keeper has an office in the hoisting works and registers 
every man's ingoing and outcoming with the regularity 
of a machine. The shift bosses report men missing 
or sick, also accidents, or anything else of importance. 
They tally loads of ore and waste rock, filling up a 
printed blank. The superintendent thus knows how 
much work each shift has accomplished. Each level 
has a foreman. The mine has also a general under- 
ground foreman, and an assistant to take his place at 
night. As regards the workmen, there is complete 
classification. The timber men attend to the supports 
of the various worldngs; the miners, drill men, and 
drifters hew and cut passages and extract the ore; the 
pump men and engineers see to their respective duties. 
Watchmen make regular rounds, messengers carry 
orders, take the men water or tools, and gather up the 
dulled picks and crowbars to send them to the forges. 

Lamps, candles, and electric lights gleam along the 
rocky aisles of the mines, except in long unused por- 
tions. Since one mine is connected with another on 
the various levels, the boundary lines being accurately 
marked on the walls of the main drifts, the longer 
streets of the underground city extend for three and 
four miles, and in active times men are met at almost 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 227 

every corner and turn, singly or in groups. It is a busy, 
populous city, and its inhabitants are a superb race of 
men, white-skinned twilight dwellers, naked except 
for shoes, overalls, and small felt caps. They go about 
quietly with hardly a word to each other. It is a land 
of silence as well as of candlelight. One begins to 
understand why miners have always made such uncon- 
querable soldiers at times of national need; these men 
are soldiers already in their power to yield prompt 
obedience and in their capacity to move together in 
solid phalanxes. 

On the Comstock the arch enemy is heat. *^ View 
their work! " says Mr. Lord in his history of the lode. 
" They enter narrow galleries where the air is scarce 
respirable. By the dim light of their lanterns a dingy 
rock surface braced by rotting props is visible. The 
stenches of decaying vegetable matter, hot, foul water, 
and human excretions intensify the effects of the heat.'^ 
Th« men can not wear woollen garments, they perspire 
so freely. In the most heated parts of the mine they 
work teij or fifteen minutes, then run to thrust their 
heads under cooler water from the pipes, and to breathe 
deeply the fresh air forced out of the blowing tubes. 
They soon become so exhausted that the shift boss 
orders them back to lighter work in less torrid drifts. 
Miles of passageways have been cut in air so unendura- 
ble that candles burned blue and went out, and men 
falling down were dragged back by their comrades. 

About 1868 it began to be noticed that the points 
of greatest heat in the lode moved considerably from 
year to year, as if the hot-water streams sometimes 
filled one part of the lode and sometimes another. 
Crown Point, on the f ourtecn-hundred-f oot level, struck 
a stream so hot that eggs were readily cooked in it, but 
a year later the heat at this place was much lessened. 
16 



228 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

Bullion on the seventeen-hundred-foot level registered 
140° Fahr. About this time an enormous vein of hot 
water was tapped at various points along the lode. It 
has been estimated that the water pumped out of the 
Comstock at this period and the air in circulation 
through the mines were together removing annually 
an amount of caloric that was the full equivalent of 
that produced by fifty-six thousand tons of the best 
anthracite coal, burned in the most economical man- 
ner. Notwithstanding this constant extraction of heat 
from the lode, the temperature continued to increase, 
though with many fluctuations, as greater depths were 
attained in the various mines. 

Specialists have had a pretty quarrel over the cause 
of the heat in the lode. Prof. Church says: " Chemical 
combinations between the water and the lode rocks" 
— technically, kaolinization of the lode feldspar. 
Others say that the water in the lode rises from " where 
the eruptive rocks retain much of their primal heat." 
The highest recorded water temperature here is 175° 
Fahr., and large areas of rock remain at from 130° 
to 150°. When the miners were working on the lowest 
levels of the deepest shafts, three thousand feet and 
more from the surface, there was every sign of enter- 
ing a new hot belt probably far greater than any heat 
previously known in the entire history of mining. By 
the compressed-air pipes the five or six men at a head- 
ing receive fully seven hundred cubic inches of air 
per minute. It reaches the place at a temperature 
of about 90°, seldom less. On some levels each miner 
drinks three or four gallons of ice water in his eight- 
hour shift. The hotter parts of Consolidated Virginia 
have required ninety-five pounds of ice daily to every 
miner at work. " Even with this help," said the Terri- 
torial Enterprise, ^^four picked men in some stopes 



THE CITY UNDEKGROUND. 229 

have found themselves unable to do the work of one 
man in a cool drift." An incline in Savage became 
so tropical as it advanced that the men who were ar- 
ranging the pump rod at a new station staggered out 
half dead with cholera-like cramps caused by the blind- 
ing heat and foul air. Men lost their wits, raved, sang, 
talked like lunatics, and had to be taken to a less heated 
part of the level, where they were rubbed and kneaded 
from head to foot, especially on the stomach. Some- 
times it was necessary to carry them to the surface 
and obtain prompt medical attendance. Under these 
searching strains, which tried the best constitutions 
until the weakest place gave way, men often perished 
in the drifts. Besides those who yielded to heart fail- 
ure, apoplexy, and suffocation, some were tortured to 
death by falling into pools of boiling water. 

Besides this intense heat of the lower levels, the 
hot water met with in running drifts and crosscuts 
is sometimes so poisonous with the minerals it contains 
in solution that when a vein is tapped it blinds every 
miner in that part of the workings. Their faces swell 
and their eyes remain closed until they have been some 
time in the open air and under medical treatment. 
Then, too, the old shafts in the upper levels, long ago 
abandoned and marked " dangerous " on the mine 
maps, have been left to darkness and decay. Acres of 
underground passages and ore chambers here are 
ghastly, crumbling ruins, trembling under the step of 
every explorer. Timbers are twisted and crushed to 
half their original length or pressed together by the 
weight of the mountains overhead until they seem 
like flattened, broken, entangled straws in the " lake " 
of a cider press. Occasionally some one creeps along 
the remaining crevices into the shapeless and fast-clos- 
ing chambers of ancient bonanzas. The foul and 



230 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

musty odours of a cliarnel house fill the hot, dripping, 
desolate darkness; moist and slimy fungi of gigantic 
size and strange shapes grow out of the walls and tim- 
bers; fire damp fills many of the drifts, and dangerous 
explosions occur; phosphorescent lights glow at times 
in these tangled tropical forests overthrown and crushed 
together, and in winter nights abandoned shafts are 
sometimes illuminated with dazzling blue fiames that 
might serve for the witch scene of an opera. 

The ordinary accidents which are everywhere in- 
separable from mining life occur on the Comstock in 
every possible form, only on a larger scale than usual. 
The character of the vein matter would be termed 
" extra hazardous " by every mining man. Three hun- 
dred fatal accidents and six hundred " severe injuries '' 
were reported in the files of the Virginia City news- 
papers between 1863 and 1880. It is safe to estimate 
that from the time the mines were opened in 1859 to 
the summer of 1893 — thirty-four years — there have 
been six hundred fatal and tvv^elve hundred severe acci- 
dents on the Comstock. The years for which the sta- 
tistics are most complete show inexplicable variation. 
Accidents seem to go by groups and seasons, and there 
are many superstitions respecting the subject among 
miners themselves. 

Although not the greatest source of mining disas- 
ter, according to statistics, a fire is by far the most 
dreaded of all accidents. In some mines there is but 
a single shaft up which to escape, and smoke and ex- 
plosive gases add to the dangers. There may be eight 
or nine hundred men compelled to take their turns 
to ascend the shaft in the cages; the gas explosions 
put out most of the lights, and men rushing to escape 
fall headlong into winzes and chutes. Other accidents 
only endanger a few men nearest the scene, but when 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 231 

the timbers take fire every person in the mine is in 
imminent danger. The slightest smell of anything 
burning is instantly noticed and examined into. A 
man could cause an excitement throughout half a dozen 
levels of a mine by lighting a newspaper in a candle, 
for the smoke would soon penetrate the drifts, and 
anxious miners would begin to tumble out of every 
nook and cranny. 

The amount of lumber packed into a mine is so 
great and the draught in case of fire is so violent that 
hurricanes of flames and smoke leap through the nar- 
row channels of rock p.nd beat in resistless waves to 
the remotest opening. It can hardly be possible to 
overestimate the inflammability of a well-timbered 
Comstock mine. Where bonanzas once existed are 
oval chambers, one or two thousand feet high, packed 
full of cribs of timbers, with hundreds of floors of two- 
and three-inch planks on which the miners stood to 
work away at the roof as they rose on frame after frame 
from the bottom to the top of the bonanza. There 
are stairs, timber-lined chutes, winzes, drifts, and cross- 
cuts, and everywhere, besides the heavy timbers, there 
are miles of " lagging ^^ behind the frames. Things 
could not be better arranged for a conflagration. 

Some glimpses of the famous fire in Yellow Jacket 
will serve to illustrate the subject. Here the fire began 
about seven o'clock one April morning in 1869 on the 
eight-hundred-foot level, two hundred feet from the 
main shaft. The morning shift was in the mine when 
the alarm was given, and Gold Hill and Virginia City 
were aroused. At the shafts of Kentuck and Crown 
Point, the adjacent mines, as well as in the Yellow 
Jacket shaft, blinding volumes of smoke prevented 
descent. As when a ship is in the breakers grinding 
to pieces against sharp rocks, those on board are some- 



232 THE STORY OF THE MIXE. 

times as completely beyond mortal help as if they were 
upon another planet, so in this case the firemen and 
miners found it impossible to descend, not only on 
account of the black, thick smoke, but because of the 
highly mineralized and deadly gases which made men 
faint and dizzy yards from the mouths of the shafts. 

A safety lantern was put on a cage and sent down 
with a message of cheer written in large letters on a 
piece of pasteboard: "We shall get you out soon. It 
is death to attempt to come up from where you are. 
Write a word to us." The cage descended slowly, stop- 
ping long at level after level to the lowest point at 
w^hich any of the men were; it came back without any 
reply. A draught suddenly drew the smoke out of 
the Kentuck shaft, and men were able to descend in the 
cages; they found the bodies of two miners; the gather- 
ing of Death's harvest had begun. Crown Point could 
not be entered, but the smoke and gas drew away from 
Yellow Jacket after an hour or two, and men began 
to bring up the dead in that shaft, carrpng them 
through a circle of rope extended about the hoisting 
works and la}dng them on the ground. 

Firemen took hose, and carried it down the shaft to 
the eight-hundred-foot level; miners and timber men 
went with them, putting out flames, propping up fall- 
ing walls and sides of drifts half filled in places with 
debris from the roofs. Such a battle in the recesses 
of a mine equals, and indeed surpasses, in elements 
of danger and heroism the fiercest fire battle that men 
ever waged on the surface of the earth. They played 
streams of water all day upon red-hot rock and into 
boiling lakes, and the water ran at scalding heat from 
the giant pumps. Sudden caves drove poisonous gases 
upon them; they were paralyzed by fumes of sulphur, 
antimony, and other minerals, and were sent up the 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 233 

still smoking shaft, whose heavy timbers fortunately 
had not been destroyed. 

After thirty hours of continuous labour the firemen 
and miners recovered twenty-three bodies. The fire 
broke out again and again, with new jets of deadly 
gas; it became evident that no life remained in the 
ruins, and at last, after several days and nights of un- 
availing struggle in the three mines, the mouths of the 
shafts were hermetically sealed and steam was forced 
into them with all the force of the giant engines. Two 
days later the shafts were opened and more bodies 
found, but the fire broke out, and the mines were again 
sealed. This alternation continued several times, for 
the whole mining community was determined to recover 
every body; but the firemen were brought up insensible, 
even seventy-five days after the first outbreak of the 
fire. The miners at last walled up the smouldering 
fire on the eight-hundred-foot levels of Kentuck and 
Crown Point, where it continued to burn for a year or 
more. It is a well-authenticated fact that three years 
afterward there was still red-hot rock in some of these 
drifts. 

The scenes that occurred in the mine when the fire 
broke out were graphically told in the Territorial En- 
terprise and other newspapers, whose reporters inter- 
viewed every man who escaped in the first cage load 
before smoke and gas had filled the shaft. The story 
reads like a leaf from the destruction of Pompeii — 
darkness, smoke, ashes, rains of fire, fatal vapours 
asphyxiating the panic-stricken people of the submon- 
tanic city. The Crown Point miners crowded in the 
cage, where they hung to every bar in such wild con- 
fusion that the station keeper thought many of them 
would be torn to pieces, and so held the cage until it 
had only time to escape, remaining behind himself 



234 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

and losing his life. One miner, hastening toward the 
shaft in the total darkness, all lights having been put 
out by gas explosions, dropped on his knees and began 
to crawl forward till he was at the edge of the shaft. 
Several other miners ran up from behind, and he heard 
them fall headlong into the deeps. 

Outside, the scenes that occurred as bodies were 
brought out of the volcano mouth, and, most of all, 
when the order to seal the shafts was given, were such 
as abide in one's memory for a lifetime. Wives, chil- 
dren, fathers, mothers, friends of the doomed men 
were all there, adding their separate passions to the 
awful grief and despair. Some wept, some wrung 
their hands and cried aloud, some appeared as if sud- 
denly insane or stupefied and overwhelmed by the 
calamity. ISTow and then a woman fainted and was 
carried home by her friends, and ever the crowd grew 
as the more remote cottages of the miners poured forth 
wild women hurrying from washtubs and housework 
to where the black smoke rolled forth, a sign to the 
cities of the lode that precious human lives were being 
lost in that vast dsedalian labyrinth a thousand feet 
below. As each body was carried out, a wailing cry 
rang through the crowd like the winter wind in Sierra 
pines: " AYho is it? " " Who is it this time? '' Then 
the wives of the missing miners came forward to look, 
and some one shrieked recognition, and those that car- 
ried the dead sobbed as they turned back for another. 

Later there were other fires. Explosions shook the 
solid earth and hurled sheets of flame two thousand 
feet along the drifts from mine to mine. Scorched 
bodies were found beside the fire track, but miners in 
the cross-cuts escaped. Again, some months after- 
ward, the Belcher air shaft caught fire. The men were 
got out of the mine, but gas explosions that were heard 



-'""^ 




f 




^ 










■ ■ j 


1 




i 
j 




The r.ottoin ol a Sliati 



THE CITY UXDERGROUND. 235 

a mile off and spurts of flame five hundred feet high 
warned the superintendent that the drifts must be 
closed or the whole mine would soon be a mass of 
flames. He called for eighteen unmarried volunteers 
for a desperate undertaking, and had great difliculty 
in choosing among those that came forward. They 
were hastily bulkheading the m^ain drift near the burn- 
ing shaft when a large cave in the latter changed the 
direction of the draught, and instantly a breaker of 
white flame rolled forward through the drift. Nine 
of the eighteen men " were hoisted out scarred and 
crisp, their clothes burned from their bodies." A sec- 
ond gang of volunteers took the place of the first and 
completed the bulkhead. 

A remarkable struggle for life occurred in the Suc- 
cor mine, a little off the Comstock, on the Silver City 
grade. Some miners who wished to " thaw out " their 
frozen giant powder put a dozen cartridges on the en- 
gine boilers and went away. Pretty soon the cartridges 
began to burn, throv/ing out jets of flame that rose to 
the woodwork, and so the hoisting works blazed up 
in a moment. The mine was a small one, and little 
vrork was being done at the time; two men were down 
in the shaft, five hundred feet below, and the hoisting 
tub was there also. The car man and engineer shouted 
to the men and shook the cable, but failed to make 
them understand that they were in great peril. Then 
the fire drove everybody out of the building. It was 
soon in flames and fell in, and the timbers of the shaft 
itself began to ignite. Of course every one knew that 
there was no hope after that for the men below, who 
could not escape suffocation. But two days later, when 
the fire was put out and a gang of miners went down, 
they found the bodies of the two men ^' at the pump 
station," a recess in the side of the shaft. They had 



236 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

actually climbed two hundred and sixty-five feet by 
clinging like snails to the corner timbers and slight 
crevices. Foot by foot their marvellous journey was 
traced, and it still remains an unequalled feat in the 
annals of mining. They were in perfect safety in the 
sheltered alcove until the poisonous gas from the burn- 
ing pine rose to that point and destroyed them. A 
polite coroner's jury a few days later said: " We must 
strongly deprecate the custom prevalent in many mines 
of warming giant powder on the boilers about the 
works." 

The spirit in which the miners meet peril and death 
is almost uniformly the cool, careless fatalism of many 
a war veteran. Some of their grim jests still ring like 
the sayings of old Norse sea kings. A premature blast 
in one of the mines once drove a foot-long splinter 
through the hand of a timber man, through the lag- 
ging he was working on, and into the soft rock. " We 
shan't need a spragg at this end. Bill! " was his cool 
remark. A " spragg," be it understood, is a square 
stick of wood six or eight inches long. One end is 
put against the posts of the timbering; the other end, 
sHghtly sharpened, is against the heavy planks, called 
lagging. The pressure of the walls upon the planks 
gradually forces them out, and the spraggs go steadily 
through into the rock behind. When the planks reach 
the post the men in charge take picks, relieve the pres- 
sure, and put in new spraggs. This system keeps the 
main timbers from being broken. 

A still more famous case of nerve was furnished 
by a brawny young Cornishman who fell into a main 
shaft. Twenty feet down he came to the pump station 
out of which the old-style pump '^ bob-nose " pro- 
jected a little, and by agility, strength, and good for- 
tune he was enabled to seize it with both hands, and so 



THE CITY UNDERGROUND. 237 

hung over the shaft, swinging from the slippery iron. 
He made no outcry, knowing that he had been seen to 
fall and that men would look down the shaft. When 
a bucket was lowered and he was brought up he cast 
a careless glance over his shoulder as he walked off and 
said: " If ee ha^nt caught hold of the bob ee'd ha' been 
scattered all abroad by now! " 

We have thus studied the toils and adventures of 
the citizens of the real Comstock, the men of shafts, 
drifts, winzes, and ore chambers. This strange hidden 
realm begins to take shape in one's mind. It is truly 
a city, but it is not like the cities of the surface, nor 
can it be even measurably described by the terms and 
phrases that apply to such cities. If the California 
and Consolidated Virginia mines could be taken out 
of the great lode and set on a plain, they would cover a 
parallelogram thirteen hundred and ten feet one way 
and about three thousand feet the other. The height 
to which they would rise would be over three thousand 
feet. Through the mass around and within it one 
would see so many galleries and pathways that to re- 
move the whole body of material piecemeal would seem 
easier than to construct a tithe of them. Everywhere 
there are angles, curves, and irregularities, as veins 
of ore have been followed. Everywhere the mass of 
soft, mineralized matter mingled with hardest rock is 
bored, patched together, upheld by braces, and kept 
from instant collapse. These mines, moreover, are 
only two out of many. The whole lode, if plucked 
forth by the roots, would present similar characteris- 
tics, and, more than this, it would lean like the Pisan 
tower, and the sides would run in and out like a top- 
pling, wave-worn cliif full of coves and promontories. 
But the Comstock seems to me a more impressive 
fact just as it stands, walled in by mountains and rooted 



238 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

so deep that men may toil there through centuries 
to come without reaching the bottom of its "fissure 
vein/' After meditating upon the paths, lanes, alleys, 
roads, crossroads, and highways of the great group of 
mines, rising by stairs on stairs, from level to level, 
one is ready to grasp the completed conception of the 
labyrinthian wilderness, where, in the midst of aban- 
doned acres of caves, pitfalls, and jungles of fungi- 
overgrown timbers, lie masses of ore and yet-undiscov- 
ered bonanzas. 

Imagine, then, a city built by fallen angels or by 
the jinn and genii of Arabian legend. They have riven 
the Himalayas, the roof -ridge of the world, and in the 
vast cleft they have builded with stones and metals, 
cell by cell, as the honeybee builds. Millions of years 
the dwellers have toiled until the cleft, from palm- 
land levels to where deodars grow in the edges of snovr 
drifts, is full and running over. At last the kingdom 
of the genii is overthrown by some superhuman hero. 
"Wrathfuily, then, the defeated ones rain fire and molten 
rock down the Himalayan cleft, pile mountains over- 
head, and pass, black- winged, out of sight forever! 
Still, traditions of the wondrous city live on in singers' 
tales, mingled with stories of heroes and the gods in 
their high places; still, men's imaginations cling to 
the legend. Then, in the fulness of time, treasure- 
seekers come, tracking up a barren canon the faint 
spatter of molten drops blown from towers of gold 
in the wondrous cit}^s conflagration. They tunnel 
into the cleft, they sink shafts into measureless depths, 
still molten with rains of fire, until they find and empty 
the palace roomys of the princes and monarchs of a race 
that existed before the generations of men. 



CHAPTER XX. 

THE MINIJTG COMMUNITY. 

Geeater thaji the city are the dwellers therein; 
finer than all incidents and illustrations of the magni- 
tude and material wealth of the Comstock, are lessons 
of human faith, courage, and ability to conquer every 
obstacle, that are taught by the story of the mines. 
For a period of time as long as an average life the 
famous group has been training men to be miners; has 
been creating specialized types of character in the 
midst of a peculiarly courageous and intelligent com- 
munity. 

Along the Comstock, year after year, the bonds of 
common interest and sectional pride drew men closer 
together in spite of strenuous rivalries. Periods of 
bonanza replaced pioneer cabins with edifices of brick 
and stone, terraced upon the hillsides. Periods of 
borrasca welded social ties among those whose fortunes 
were inseparable from that of the Comstock, even as a 
trip hammer unites steel blooms into armour-plates for 
girding iron leviathans of war. Men, women, and chil- 
dren learned to love the keen excitements, the splendid 
physical activities, the perpetual outpourings of energ)% 
the virile, superb, passionate life of the mining camp. 

Everywhere, almost unheeded, in the bustling, rest- 
less community, were the hidden elements of literature, 
but, strangely enough, no world-famous tale of the 
Comstock has vet sprung from the fertile soil. Here 
" 239 



240 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

and there a few Californians have attempted to picture 
the changing life of early Nevada before it passed away, 
and brilliant local writers have photographed episodes 
and single characters. But no great novelist seems 
to have recognised the preciousness of the fast-passing 
opportunity. Some day the story-teller will come who 
can add another masterpiece to literature, as one long 
dead but not forgotten once went to a crumbling adobe 
house and a poor, despised race, and there wrote 
Eamona. 

Said a man who knew and loved the Comstocker; 
" The person who only judges from the exterior has 
no business in the camp. He will be picked up a little 
too often for pleasure if not set down a little too heavily 
for comfort. A man can have any game he wants, 
whether played with a pack of cards or with pistols, 
whether straight from the shoulder, or in kindness 
from the heart." Dr. Gaily can also be called as wit- 
ness to the characteristics of the men of these and other 
mountain camps: "They are not good people in the 
Sunday-school view, but there is a spirit of charity and 
a Saxon sense of fair play about them which is a sub- 
stitute. A deliberate insult to a woman or a child is 
a bid for instant death, and the general verdict is, 
' Served him right! ^ But no man here is any other 
able-bodied person's guardian. Whoever wishes to go 
to the dogs, goes to the dogs. There is no restraint, 
or, as they express it, ^ There is nobody holding you.' '' 

Mining camps, large and small, openly wear their 
worst side out. Whatever vice exists is open to the sun. 
With much that is evil, there is also much that is noble, 
and even heroic. Meanness is very scarce, and shams 
of any sort are instantly punctured. " What do you 
know? " is a common morning salutation, and " What 
can 3^011 do?" expresses the habitual attitude of the 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 241 

camp toward every stranger. Everywhere among this 
great and peculiar race of men one finds a graphic, 
broadly humorous, or quaintly burlesque use of words; 
never in any part of the world has language been more 
perfectly fitted to daily needs. Here are grotesque 
idioms and ancient yet living dialects; here, also, is 
Shakespeare's English, new-minted by the men of the 
camp into homely phrases that have become American. 
The frontiersman is here, but the backwoodsman has 
been eliminated. One notices with surprise that these 
men, and in fact all others in the camp, seem endowed 
with an undismayed spirit of humorous buoyancy, 
curiously common here to all temperaments, climatic, 
consonant with the clearness, dryness, and purity of 
the atmosphere, and yet so individualized as to be full 
of a rare and inexpressible charm. 

As for the workers in and about the mines, the 
minutely classified body of men that form the real 
nucleus of the camp and give it these distinctive fea- 
tures, no other group of men in America are more com- 
pactly organized, none show a keener intelligence, and 
none are deeper-chested, stronger-limbed mountain- 
eers. Their abounding vitality and cool, steady cour- 
age (in the mining-camp term, " sand ") have received 
abundant illustration in the preceding pages, but noth- 
ing has been said of their love and tenderness for each 
other in times of need. Men become "pards," and 
each one lives for the other, willing to die for him if 
there is a chance, and that may come at any moment. 
They take care of the sick with the gentleness and pa- 
tience of trained hospital nurses. It is a heroic fellow- 
ship at its best — the social order of this masterful, 
masculine community. 

The underground miner as he goes about the 
street is a well-dressed, clean person, who takes a 



.242 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

daily bath and changes his clothing twice a day 
— oiice when his shift goes on, and once when it 
conies off. He is calmly proud of his occupation, 
in the purely professional spirit, but personally he is 
as modest a man as one could wish to see; it is not at 
all his fault that he is in his way an aristocrat among 
working men. His life has made him a sane, thought- 
ful, responsible person as far as mining goes, no matter 
how lawless of social conventions he may choose to be 
in other directions. He knows himself responsible for 
the Hves of his fellow-workmen; his own life hangs 
upon the honesty of another's work, and that other's 
life hangs upon the honesty of his own work. A single 
careless prop, a defective bolt or timber, any neglect 
or lack of thoroughness, any laziness or ignorance, is 
sure to bring calamity, and may bring death. There- 
fore this responsible professional personage is as stern 
as Ehadamanthus in liis judgments upon all that per- 
tains to his business. 

Xo incompetent foreman can govern such men. 
In a great fire at Crown Point, Senator John P. Jones, 
then superintendent, found it necessary to cut a pipe 
on the seven-hundred-foot level. It was midnight, and 
almost continuously for five days and nights he had 
been foremost in leading the dripping firemen and half- 
naked miners through smoking, flaming, steaming 
drifts. Jones and a young man went alone into the 
level to drive a plate of steel through the pipe. They 
worked for fifteen minutes in an atmosphere so deadly 
that the lights almost failed them, and the miner could 
hardly hold the plate. The lights went out as the last 
stroke fell, and Jones carried his fainting, half-delirious 
assistant to the main shaft and held him during the 
ascent. When the hoisting room was reached he 
dropped his burden on the floor and staggered bhndly 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 243 

to a bunk. Such were the leaders of the Comstock 
miners. 

One can hardly understand the curious ebb and 
flow of mining life in its mingling of admirable reserve 
with dangerous turbulence without long meditation 
upon that troglodytic existence often so singularly 
barren of colour and variety, and yet so inexorable in 
its demands upon heart, hand, and brain. Men might 
toil with dull persistency for months in a dark, dripping 
vault, picking down a wall and wheeling out rock; one 
twist of the pick might fill the drift with a foaming, 
resistless river of water. The divine elements of mys- 
tery and passion were forever hovering near them. 
Thus miners become, in the course of years of toil, 
magnificent examples of the power of such environ- 
ment to stimulate the emotions and intellects of labour- 
ers, and to produce a people with vast capacities for 
love and hate, for sarcasm and laughter, for terrible 
wraih and for sublime self-sacrifice. 

From the most ancient times, says Gamboa, the 
toils of the mine have been a punishment for slaves, 
a torment for martyrs, a means of revenge for tyrants. 
The Belgians purposely called the mining shaft " la 
fosse,'^ the grave, and the Cornish pits were named 
" coffins." This dreary and exhausting employment 
makes men long for amusement; they become reckless 
and yield to the strong and coarse temptations of min- 
ing towns. The staples of leisure-hour existence mean 
to thousands deep drinking and high gaming. The 
vast fortunes made and lost in mining stocks, and the 
fluctuations in real values of the mines themselves, 
insensibly warp the judgment and make the whole 
community restless, eager, ever anxious for sudden 
gains. A leading Comstock mine owner once said 
that he " did not mind what wages he paid his men," 
17 



24:4 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

for " all tlie surplus " came back to him in liis stock 
deals. 

The simple, childlike men of the mining camps 
were quickly stirred for good or evil. During the war 
the " sanitary flour sack " of Nevada became historic. 
It began its career in an outside camp where an elec- 
tion bet was made that the loser should carry a fifty- 
pound sack of flour through the town and donate it 
to the Sanitary Commission. Gridley, to whom this 
fate befel, put the sack up at auction, and $4,539 in 
gold was realized. He then took it and started, in May, 
1864, on a tour of the Pacific coast. When the famous 
sack reached the Comstock, Mark Twain and Tom 
Fitch made speeches, and the towns on the lode took 
a holiday. Gridley, covered with flags, the sack of flour 
on his shoulder, walked through the streets, escorted 
by brass bands, military companies, carriages, horse- 
men, and the multitude. Silver City invested $1,800. 
Gold Hill poured out $6,587, and when Gridley reached 
Virginia City and mounted the platform with his won- 
drous sack the miners were determined to " play the 
game for all it was worth." The Chollar miners, 
through their spokesman, offered $500; Potosi miners 
raised them, and so it rose by hundred-dollar leaps, 
as group after group entered the contest, till the Gould 
and Curry miners, to use their own phrase, " lifted the 
rest of the boys out of their boots " by paying $3,500 
in cash. Coin rattled like hail on the platform until 
nearly $14,000 was raised. Men climbed over chairs 
and emptied their pockets before Gridley. Accord- 
ing to the Territorial Enterprise, a " small brown bug " 
crawling on a man^s arm was caught, put up at auc- 
tion, and sold for ten dollars for the Sanitary Fund, 
as a sort of side-show, while Gridley was still auction- 
ing ofl his flour. A person who jeered irreverently 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 245 

at the bug, and also suggested that the money "had 
better be given straight," was immediately thrashed 
by an irate miner. 

Nothing in the long story of the Comstock sur- 
passed the outburst of delight that took place upon 
the surrender of Lee. The people "went wild in a 
frenzy of emotion." Said one of the newspapers: " No 
such drinking was ever before seen anywhere. In three 
hours the majority of the men of the city were crazy 
drunk, including many who were never before under 
the influence of liquor, and were to be seen lying in 
heaps. Business was entirely suspended, and the 
printers, editors, and reporters being all drunk, no 
papers were issued." Mark Twain himself could not 
invent a more unique, plausible, and all-sufficient edi- 
torial excuse for not coming out on time. Eabelais 
in all his madcap revels never depicted such " high 
old times " as Virginia City saw that day. Men left 
the saloons and walked the streets, drinking the healths 
of the war heroes and of the war President until the 
last reveller sank into maudlin sleep. A few days later 
came the news of the assassination of Lincoln. Then 
the men of the Comstock wept like children and draped 
their houses and stores in black. Seizing a man who 
muttered approval of the deed, they gave him thirty 
lashes on the bare back, and were with great difficulty 
restrained from hanging him. 

Newspapers were very numerous in the Nevada 
mining camps. Scores of brilliant and audacious 
writers entered the new fields with able publications 
whose scattered files will always remain the best con- 
temporary record, and often the only one, of many a 
forgotten district long since abandoned to primeval 
silence. The support that these journals received was 
surprisingly liberal, and while the camps were pros- 



246 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

perous they were bonanzas to their fortunate owners. 
Before the Big Bonanza was exhausted more than a 
hundred different nevrspapers had been started in the 
scattered towns of Nevada, whose population was only 
sixty thousand people. *' Along the shore where these 
dismantled journals were driven by adverse winds," 
writes one of the pioneer editors, " are buried many 
absurd, strange, wonderful, and often tragic experi- 
ences." A few, a very few, of the old-time editors 
survive, in a world as remote from their thoughts and 
training as the thickly settled, railroad-gridironed 
Sacramento Valley is remote from one of the white- 
haired trappers of Siskiyou. Some of them, winning 
a wider fame, left the Comstock, or Eeese Eiver, or 
White Pine, decades ago; others, tired of the " festive 
pistol's popping" and *^a man for breakfast every 
morning," have learned to plant orchards and vine- 
yards in the California valleys, and so lengthened their 
days after the long service of pioneer journalism. 

Hard and ceaseless that service was. Into every 
new camp some wandering editor-printer went with 
his press, types, and outfit, was noisily welcomed by 
the miners, turned his mule loose on the hillside, and 
began to pencil his announcement for the first issue 
of the Prospect, Miner, Argent, Silver State, True Fis- 
sure, Eeveille, Messenger, or whatever he chose to call 
the new venture. The Silver Bend Eeporter, started 
in such a manner, in 1867, at a frontier mining village 
in a rocky canon of ISTye County, announced its advent 
in language that was there considered a model of the 
dignified style of salutatory: " Here, in this bright ofi'- 
shoot of civilization, surrounded by a vast ocean of 
wilderness, shall be a newspaper! In young, vigorous, 
and beautiful Belmont we have settled." The Terri- 
torial Enterprise, the pioneer newspaper of the region. 



THE MIKING COMMUNITY. 947 

had five men on the editorial staff and twenty-two 
compositors. Five hundred dollars a month was the 
salary of the managing editor. Mark Twain and Dan 
De Qnille were reporters. About this time Tom Fitch, 
of the Union, challenged Joe Goodman, of the Enter- 
]3rise, to a duel in Six-Mile Caiion. Mark Twain re- 
corded his disappointment in the next issue: "Young 
Wilson and ourselves at once mounted a couple of fast 
horses and followed in their wake at the rate of a mile 
a minute, since when, being neither iron-clad nor half- 
scled, we enjoy more real comfort in standing up than 
in sitting down. But we lost our bloody item, for 
Marshall Perry arrived early with a detachment of 
constables, and Deputy-Sheriff Blodgett came with a 
lot of blarsted sub-sheriffs, and these miserable, med- 
dling whelps arrested the whole party and marched 
them back to tov/n." 

Columns of this sort of thing could be culled from 
the pioneer newspapers of the Comstock in the days 
of their glory, when their laughing and fighting 
writers were the most virile, rollicldng, merciless, ten- 
der-hearted quill-drivers in America. E. M. Daggett, 
Henry Mighels, of Carson, M3Ton Angel, J. T. Good- 
man, and D. E. TilcCarthy were among the most famous 
ISTevada editors of the period, and nearly all of them 
belong to the Comstock group of newspapers, where 
they first exhibited their high literary abilities. A 
little later, while these veterans were still in harness 
and a younger group of writers — such as Sam Davis 
and Arthur ]\IcEwen — were becoming known, the 
press of ISTevada contained more real Pacific-coast lit- 
erature and gave its writers more freedom of expres- 
sion than did the newspapers of California and Oregon 
put together. 

A pioneer newspaper office early in the 'GO's is de- 



248 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

scribed as a rickety one-story frame building about 
twenty feet wide. It contained an old-style Washing- 
ton press, cases, desks, and editor's table. A small 
lean-to addition was the kitchen and dining room, and 
sleeping-bunks like those in a ship^s forecastle occu- 
pied one side. On cold winter nights the stove was made 
red-hot, and the printers moved as close to it as possible 
and " lashed old sacks around their feet with bale rope " 
to keep themselves warm. When it rained the roof 
leaked, and the dripping water was led over the cases 
by strings, so many of which filled the upper part of the 
roof that it looked as if hung with " webs of Brobding- 
nagian spiders.'^ Every one, down to the printer's 
devil, had shares in some favourite mine, and boxes 
full of specimens lay around in the corners. When a 
prospector from the desert entered the office, editors 
and printers dropped their work and gathered around 
him to listen and ask questions. Many of these pioneer 
newspaper men had done more or less prospecting them- 
selves. 

Stories about Mark Twain, whose brother was Ter- 
ritorial Secretary, are countless in Nevada. He came 
to Virginia City from another camp, where he had 
been writing letters signed " Josh." When the first 
steam press in Nevada started in the Enterprise office, 
the " general mix-up of new press, newspaper, and bot- 
tles of wine " caused Twain to take among other things 
what he averred was " a severe cold on his mind." He 
staid at home and one of his chums took his place at 
the local desk. The next morning the paper contained 
an article purporting to come from Mark Twain, in ; 
which he was made to make an abject and circumstan- 
tial apology to a large number of Virginia City news- 
paper men and other citizens whom he had at vari- 
ous times criticised. This document instantly cured 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 249 

the "cold on the mind/' and Twain, resuming his 
editorial chair, described its late incumbent as " a rep- 
tile endowed with no more intellect, no more cultiva- 
tion, no more Christian principle than animates and 
adorns the sportive Jackass rabbit of the Sierras! " 

But it was as legislative reporter that Clemens be- 
came a shining light of the times. Besides his sober, 
everyday Senate and Assembly items, he concocted a 
Third House report which pelted the Legislature with 
incessant sarcasm. Member after member was made to 
air his views in a grandiose burlesque of his favourite 
expressions. After an excellent parody upon Senator 
Stewart's famous speech against taxing the mines, the 
president of this mythical Third House responded: 

" Take your seat. Bill Stewart! I am not going to 
sit here and listen to that same old song over and over 
again. I have been reporting and reporting that in- 
fernal speech for the last thirty days, and I want you 
to understand that you can't play it off any longer. 
When I want it I will repeat it myself — I know it by 
heart, anyhow. You and your bed-rock tunnels and 
your blighted miners' blasted hopes have got to be 
a sort of nightmare to me, and I won't put up with it 
any longer." 

Thus the humorist dealt undismayed with each 
individual idiosyncrasy of the legislators, and made 
them ridiculous throughout the length and breadth of 
INTevada. When poor Larrowe, of Eeese Eiver, returned 
to his constituency he was everywhere greeted with ad- 
miring quotations from the Proceedings of the Third 
House, such as " Nine sceptred and anointed quartz 
mills, sir, in Lander County already! " and the terse 
presidential comment: " Plant yourself, sir! plant 
yourself! I don't want any more yowling." 

Leaving the newspapers, let us again turn to the 



250 THE STOKY OF THE MINE. 

mining class. The statistics for 1880 are typical of the 
working force at a time when it was larger and better 
organized than at present. At that time there were 
2,770 miners employed, of which 770 were Americans, 
816 were Irish, 640 were English, 191 were Canadians, 
83 were Scotch, and the rest were " from everywhere." 
Welsh, Swiss, Swedes, Slavonians, Danes, Belgians, 
French, Australians, Manxmen, E'orwegians, Portu- 
guese, and Eussians were represented. There was one 
Finlander and one Laplander. Six more men were 
married than unmarried. The average age was a frac- 
tion over thirty-six; the average height was five feet 
nine and one fifth inches; the average weight was very 
close to one hundred and sixty-six pounds. Classified, 
lastly, according to employment, in thirty-nine distinct 
occupations in and around the mines, the Americans 
furnished a majority of the foremen, bosses, engineers, 
firemen, carpenters, blacksmiths, and machinists. Both 
the Irish and the English furnished more miners in the 
technical sense than the Americans did. About eight 
hundred men in all were needed in the small but im- 
portant occupations, such as masons, melters, pump 
men, brakemen, lamp men, and a dozen others; nearly 
two thousand were miners in the full meaning of the 
term. 

The organizations by wliich the Comstock miners 
have maintained wages, have ruled in this respect under 
all administrations, and still continue to rule, are sim- 
ply " Unions." At Virginia City, Gold Hill, and Sil- 
ver City their word long ago became law. On one 
occasion a superintendent who had attempted to cut 
wages was concealed in the home of a priest, or he 
would have been torn limb from limb by the indignant 
miners. ISTo Chinaman was allowed in the mines under 
any pretext. As time passed these remarkable Unions, 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 251 

which had dictated to Stewart and his allies in the 
days of the earlier bonanzas, reached out to greater 
victories. When Sharon and the Bank of California 
syndicate began to build a railroad to Virginia City 
it was decided to nse Chinese labour in grading. 

Sharon controlled nearly everything, from the news- 
papers to the Legislature; but no sooner were his Chi- 
nese graders established in a camp near the Overman 
mine than a committee of three hundred and fifty-nine 
miners from the Union went out, four abreast, like 
a military compan}^, in two battalions, and descended 
on the Chinese. The sheriff of the county ordered 
them to disperse and return home. One man replied 
that they would do so as soon as they were through, 
and advised the official to sit down and watch proceed- 
ings. He halted them and read the Kiot Act, to which 
they listened with grave attention until he had finished 
that impressive document. Then they roared sealike 
applause, gave three cheers for the "United States 
of America," and marched on with loud Homeric 
laughter. As they went along the course of the rail- 
road construction the Chinese deserted pick and shovel 
and fled into the gulches. 'Not a shot was fired. The 
" Committee " returned to report progress, and for 
eight days not a Chinaman dared to do a stroke of work, 
while the lordly Sharon was supplicating the Unions 
to permit the resumption of railroad grading. Finally 
he signed an agreement by which he removed the Chi- 
nese from the districts of Virginia City and Gold Hill. 

The wage standard that the Unions insisted upon 
was not less than four dollars a day for eight hours 
labour. All v»^orkers in the mines, skilled and un- 
skilled, were put on the same arbitrary level. Their 
one reply to every argument that if cheaper labourers 
were employed in handling low-grade ores, more men 



252 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

could be given employment at the higher rates, has 
been the curt statement, '' Pay four dollars a day or 
shut down the mines/^ 

Four dollars a day was not unusual in the mines of 
the Pacific coast at the time of the discovery of the 
Comstock. When the cost of obtaining supplies is taken 
into consideration, four dollars left the labourer less 
surplus than two dollars in field w^ork in the accessible 
valleys of Cahfornia. As the Comstock lode was de- 
veloped, only the best miners were employed, and others 
went to newer districts, thus keeping down the supply. 
The bonanzas w^ere discovered at such intervals as to 
give the best mines a large margin of profit, even when 
pajdng such wages, and the stockholders, always anx- 
ious for immediate returns, were never willing to shut 
down the mines long enough to secure a new body of 
working men, even if they could thus break up the 
Unions and greatly reduce the running expenses of 
the mines. Indeed, there never was any united effort 
to reduce wages, so violent and immediate was the re- 
volt against the slightest move in that direction, so 
strongly were the Unions supported by the whole com- 
munity. Besides, in many if not all cases the tem- 
porary closing of a mine meant the flooding of it with 
water, and perhaps years of costly efforts to pump it 
dry again. The Unions held an impregnable fortress. 

If there had been no stock market, and if careful 
business men had been owners of the mines and had 
held their shares as an investment first, last, and al- 
ways, no miners' Union or mining community could 
have prevented readjustment of the amount and the 
distribution of the wage fund. The Comstock plan, 
which paid the poorest and the best miners by the same 
scale of compensation, would have given place to a 
sUding scale fixed by the employers according to their 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 253 

ideas of the labour market. The artificial standards 
of the Union were only made possible by the unique 
financial history of the great lode; by the millions of 
dollars in unproductive assessments collected from 
eager men and women of every rank in life through- 
out the Pacific-coast States and Territories; by the 
splendid succession of bonanzas which created in turn 
the fictitious paper bonanzas of the stock markets; 
and, lastly, by the great money kings, Stewart, Jones, 
Sharon, Ealston, Hayward, and the Bonanza Four. 

Every observer of the Comstock in its palmy days 
noted the universally high standards of living. Not 
only the necessaries, but the luxuries of life formed 
the daily fare of the miners. California and the ad- 
jacent valleys sent the choicest fruits, berries, vege- 
tables, milk, fresh butter, and stall-fed beef. Trout, 
venison, bear, squirrels, quail, and grouse from the 
Sierras, salmon from the Sacramento, ducks, geese, 
snipe, and other wild fowl from the sloughs and bays, 
and oysters from the Chesapeake, were everyday affairs 
in the Virginia City markets. In 1876 the railroad 
carried to the two towns in round numbers 400,000 
pounds of fish, 350,000 pounds of poultry, 120,000 
pounds of oysters, 1,020,000 pounds of eggs, 1,000,000 
pounds of vegetables, and over 2,700,000 pounds of 
fresh fruit. Hams of the best grade to be obtained 
were a favourite article of food, and nearly 600,000 
pounds were used. It is hardly necessary to continue 
the list. 'No labourers ever lived on better fare. 

The clothing worn by the miners at home and in 
the streets was substantial and often elegant. Their 
underwear, white shirts, and shoes were of the grade 
preferred by the average storekeeper or landowner. 
The unmarried miners lived in large, well-kept lodging 
houses, the rooms of which were carpeted, heated, 



254 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

and comfortable. Bathrooms were universal, not only 
in the lodging houses but at the hoisting buildings. 
Board and lodging y/hich cost forty or forty-five dollars 
per month in bonanza times has been reduced by 1880 
to thirty dollars, and even less. 

Pay day on the Comstock comes weekly in some 
classes of work, and the habit of squaring accounts on 
Monday has grown up among merchants, so that Mon- 
day is still called " steamer day," a phrase borrowed 
from pioneer San Francisco. The regular pay day of 
the working miners is usually from the first to the 
tliird of every month. The men, as they come up out 
of the mine, go to the timekeeper's oflB.ce and get their 
accounts. Then they go to another oflB.ce, where the 
cashier or head clerk pays them. In the best Comstock 
times Consolidated Virginia's monthly pay roll was 
ninety thousand dollars, and three quarters of a million 
dollars was paid along the Comstock every month to 
the employees of the mines. Four dollars a day for 
w^orkmen counts up fast, and, besides, the engineers, 
machinists, and a f ev^^ others received five, six, and even 
seven dollars a day. The railroad men, the mill men 
along the Carson River, and the lumberers in the moun- 
tains all receive their wages in much the same way as 
the miners do, and the cities on the lode receive the 
most of it back again. In many cases every man in a 
mine leaves a dollar or two with the cashier, when he 
draws his pa}^, for the family of som.e dead comrade; 
in this way as much as two thousand dollars is some- 
times raised in five or six months. This is the miners' 
life-insurance system. 

Chosen as the miners are — the very pick of the 
mining population of the Pacific slope — they are young 
and vigorous, but, as vital statistics show, they suffer 
from pulmonary troubles. This is due to the sudden 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 255 

change from the tropic lower levels of the mine to the 
snow-covered, windy ridge of the town in winter. 
"Many a man/' says Mr. Lord, "reached his house 
half-choked with pneumonia, and spitting blood." 
The introduction of warm dressing- and waiting-rooms 
at the hoisting works lessened disease, though the vitali- 
ty of the miners continued to be sapped by their exces- 
sive use of stimulants. Long after the big bonanza days 
the average annual consumption of beer on the Corn- 
stock was fifteen gallons apiece for every resident of 
the county, and that of spirituous liquors was five gal- 
lons. The twenty thousand people spent annually 
about nine hundred thousand dollars for beer, wine, 
and ardent drinks. This was called by the saloon men 
" a dry season," hov/ever, for they had seen the average 
annual consumption of all classes of liquors nearly 
three times as much. 

The remarkable efficiency of the well-fed, well- 
clothed, and contented miners of the Comstock has 
been noted in previous chapters. There are no better 
miners known to the craft, nor can any nationality 
be said to excel. Working groups are usually made 
up of men of several nations, for they accomplish more 
in this manner. In 1877, in the California mine, 217,- 
432 tons of ore were extracted and milled. This, it 
has been estimated, was a daily average of 1.13 ton 
for each man employed. The report of the company 
gave the expenses of that year as follows: Hoisting 
ore, $186,461; supplies, $357,101; salaries and wages, 
$788,012— giving a total of $1,331,574. The 217,432 
tons of ore brought up was lifted 1,600 feet and cost 
at the surface $6.12 per ton. Mining authorities say 
that this entire record is without parallel for cheapness 
and efficiency under the given conditions. 

Never were the self-reliance" and sheer fighting 



266 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

capacity of the men of the Comstock better shown 
than during and just after the great fire of October, 
1875. It began at six o'clock in the morning in a low- 
lodging house kept by a woman called " Crazy Kate.'* 
Scores of cheap frame buildings surrounded it, every- 
thing was like tinder, and a fierce gale was blowing. 
People roused from sleep had barely time to escape 
with their lives. The hoisting works lifted men out 
of the depths as fast as possible, and miners and fire- 
men fought the flames. Vain task! The wind hurled 
fiery missiles across the city, kindling fresh centres 
of destruction, while the main torrent rolled on like a 
lava river from Kilauea, hemming in the defeated 
toilers. Great brick buildings tumbled, as in the Bos- 
ton and Chicago fires. The populace, yielding to 
despair, fied to the mountains and there looked down 
from barren rocks upon the destruction of Virginia 
City. Out of the ocean of fire came the roar of ex- 
plosives as whole masses of buildings were blown to 
pieces by gunpowder and dynamite stored within, or 
were blasted out of the way by the heroic men, still 
fighting as they retreated. Pillars of flame and the 
mass of dark smoke were seen fifteen miles away. The 
business houses, public buildings, hotels, banks, 
churches, freight and passenger depots, and many pri- 
vate residences were in flames Avhen the whole fighting 
force was centred on the costly mine works. The 
mountains shook with blasts of djTiamite, clearing 
open spaces about mills and hoisting works, but the fire 
leaped over in a hundred places at once, caught lumber 
yards and shaft houses, and swept nearly all the sur- 
face works of the mines out of existence in a few 
moments. MilUons of feet of lumber, thousands of 
cords of wood, trestles, ofiices, roofs, machinery, in- 
flammable supplies of every description, threw out such 



THE MINING COMMUNITY. 257 

heat that a pile of railroad car-wheels in the open air 
in the Ophir yards were smelted together. The fire 
began to creep down the great shafts, and here the 
miners and firemen struggled in the midst of blazing 
ruins until the mines themselves and the joint shaft 
buildings of California and Consolidated Virginia were 
saved. 

About two thousand buildings were destroyed on 
the lode, and ten million dollars would hardly have 
replaced the loss. Car loads of cooked provisions, 
blankets, and other supplies were started toward the 
Comstock while the fire was still burning. Money was 
telegraphed. Belief committees were organized in 
other towns and cities. Lumber was placed on the 
smoking earth, still being wet by firemen. Electric 
lights enabled the work of rebuilding to go on by night 
as well as by day. In sixty days the people of Vir- 
ginia City v/ere again settled comfortably. An extract 
from the official report made by the superintendent 
of Ophir will serve to show the stuff that men were 
made of in old Comstock days: " On the day after the 
fire men were sent to Carson and Dutch Flat, Cali- 
fornia, to procure and ship timbers; machinery was 
telegraphed for. The new double-reel hoisting en- 
gine just completed for the combination shaft of the 
Chollar-Potosi, Hale and Norcross, and Savage was 
secured; the old engine foundations were torn out 
and new ones constructed; work was prosecuted with- 
out cessation; supplies hauled a considerable distance 
on account of the destruction of the railroad tunnel 
and bridges; the works rebuilt and hoisting through 
the shaft resumed November 25th, being inside of 
thirty days from the time of destruction." The new 
buildings cost nearly $318,000. Consolidated Virginia 
and CaHfornia, which had lost $1,461,000 by the fire. 



258 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

replaced everything that was destroyed within fifty 
days, and yet declared without delay their regular divi- 
dends. Consolidated Virginia paid out over two mil- 
lion dollars while rebuilding its works, for it was in 
bonanza. These were extraordinary and indeed unpre- 
cedented feats of labour and capital. The city of mines 
had come out gloriously under the fire test. 

Such were the workmen, such the communities, that 
once clustered in the rocky waste on the mountains 
of Nevada. They are still the same, though since the 
Big Bonanza was worked out the mines have paid 
their owners poorly, and the towns have suffered much 
more than in any former period of borrasca. Small 
stockholders no longer carry the burden of assessments 
as formerly, but a few large owners have been forced 
to prop up the fallen market and sustain by their own 
wealth the daring and still alluring speculation. None 
except themselves can say how many m.ore millions 
of dollars these men vdll or can spend in the search. 
What new problems are to be solved in deeps below 
deeps, what magnificent metalliferous deposits may 
rest undiscovered in the great fissure, no human 
prophecy can foretell. 



CHAPTEE XXI. 
THE comstock: as it is. 

Thus far, the story has been a straightforward 
narrative of events, from the days of the trappers to 
the exhaustion of the Big Bonanza. Those Titans 
whose plots and counterplots shook half a continent 
are dead, or have forever left the Comstock. We have 
fallen upon dark and narrow times, and yet, like a ship 
long beating up some iron coast against unfriendly 
winds, each headland we round may prove to be the 
last cape that shuts us out from another prosperous 
voyage. The spirit of the true mining men was never 
so clearly present as it has been through the lesser epi- 
sodes of these sixteen weary years of the Silence of 
the Comstock. 

" She has another word to say. She is asleep, but 
not dead." Thus spoke incarnate poetry to me from 
the lips of one of the ancients as I stood on a gray 
waste pile, looking out over the barren land. The 
story ends with a question — "What next?" Is it to 
become a land without a habitation, a mountain of 
ruins like the ancient city forts of those unrecorded 
miners of Mashonaland and the Golden Chersonese? 

If thus it was now ended, how very far from a new 
story it is when all is told. Nothing among the deeds 
of gold-hungry men and wandering races of conquerors 
could be less strange than this, and yet it covers so 
large a space as to become almost an epic. Over and 
18 259 



260 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

over again, great busy camps, becoming strangely 
silent, have perished as frosted leaves. The cities the 
miner has built — who shall name or number them? 
They are hidden in trackless deserts, luring genera- 
tions of prospectors to their deaths; they lie among 
Andes and Himalayas, under glaciers, in tangled Cam- 
bodian forests, or, deeper still, where lost continents 
are sunk in ocean's dreamless ooze. Not yet has that 
hour of doom and oblivion arrived for the proud Corn- 
stock, but the sceptre has already passed to younger 
camps. 

Visit with me the Comstock, then, in this year of 
grace 1896 and let us briefly note the condition of af- 
fairs. We climb with the railroad from well-watered 
Carson's sea-green circle, through wild gorges and 
along the crest of ridges that look down upon thou- 
sands of prospect holes. Every moment the view 
broadens and brightens. We climb through a barren, 
lonely, forsaken land of strange, shining grays and 
browns, clear cut in a marvellously invigorating moun- 
tain atmosphere. The desert slopes endlessly away 
from the eternal mountains, and a soft, golden glow, 
like that which pervades one of Gerome's Egyptian 
paintings lingers in the far east, across the yellow sands, 
the silver sage brush. High peaks, treeless even to 
their deepest canons, cold, severe, and yet so wonder- 
fully chiselled and rounded that the heart leaps to be- 
hold them, are ranged about the amphitheatre wherein 
the cities of the Comstock were founded thirty-seven 
years ago. All is revealed in successive landscapes, 
as the railroad carries one upward from the valley 
floor of the Carson — ^itself a high plateau — toward 
these cities in the clouds, still strong and patient, still 
able to endure until the end. 

A little space farther and higher, and the train 



THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 261 

swings along the side of that old-time Slippery Gnlch, 
down which the pioneers slid on rainy mornings, as 
they climbed painfully, with more or less reprehensible 
language, to their new-found placers on Gold Hill. 
There, in the hollow and canon-crossed head of the 
gulch, and on its precipitous sides, so steep that as one 
explores the outlying streets his hand almost touches 
the rise of the hill, the city of Gold Hill abides, and 
all the world-famous South End mines of the Comstock 
honeycomb the vein beneath it. 

Although Gold Hill played a minor part in the 
great trilogy of the Comstock, it shows, even more than 
Virginia City, that most striking feature of the true 
Western mining camp, the adoption of the natural sur- 
face of the earth, no matter how steep, rocky, or diffi- 
cult of access, as good enough to build upon. A little 
levelling may have been necessary to keep streets and 
buildings from rolling to the bottom of the gulches, 
but as soon as the stern requirements of the law of 
gravity Vt^ere to some extent satisfied the pioneers 
ceased the struggle. Every inch of ground that a house 
can be made to cling to is occupied, and the roof of 
one line of dwellings is often on a level with the base- 
ments of the next higher row. So strenuously have 
men seized upon and utilized every point of vantage 
that the houses seem piled on top of one another in 
the centre of the town, while outside scattered dwell- 
ings climb the ridges like human beings, leaning for- 
ward against the slope and resting in groups. One 
sees in such an old mining camp so much that seems 
to subvert the ordinary laws of architectural stability, 
so many leaning towers and walls, that he is fain to 
believe that the whole mass of the town is in reality 
bolted and iron-plated together and fastened to the 
mountain slopes. In the deep horscshoc-shapcd 



262 THE STOHY OF THE MINE. 

quarry pit a mile across that by some cnrious mis- 
nomer was called Gold Hill, neighbour can talk to neigh- 
bour almost as in a theatre, so wonderfully do whole 
streets and blocks of buildings overhang those beneath 
them. 

This Gold Hill, this irregular and immense mass of 
overcrowded structures, some of rough-hewn black 
timbers, some costly and pretentious, but all mingling 
with and actually jostling the shanties; these sheds, 
barns, and rude cheap cottages; these bits of fence 
and sidewalk; these crumbling steps leading from 
street to street and from house to house, fitter for goats 
than for human beings; these black chimneys, piles of 
rusting machinery, high-roofed mills, and acres of 
white and brown dump heaps encroaching on the town 
or sloping away into gulches — all give one a vivid 
impression of what life was in the days when 
the place was crowded to the brim. In those days 
it was not a city in fact, nor yet a town; it was simply 
one great communal dwelling or primitive apartment 
house. It still has a communal aspect, for the lessen- 
ing population retires year by year from the outskirts, 
leaving shanty after shanty to rot there, and occupies 
the better buildings. 

The railroad carries us through the Divide a few 
hundred yards, and the last and greatest panorama of 
the Comstoek chain instantly sweeps into view. Sugar 
Loaf and the Flowery Eange are fully revealed, the 
North End mines and the historic metropolis of the 
silver miners lie spread out on an irregular sloping 
mound broken by ravines and hollows, rising to the 
mountains of granite on the west, and sinking into 
vast canons east. It is larger than Gold Hill, and slow- 
ly becomes more impressive, though not so immedi- 
ately picturesque. It lies marvellously open to all the 



THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 263 

winds that blow, and they seem to gather here from the 
western half of the continent. The city is a forest of 
chimney pots of all shapes and sizes and every con- 
ceivable manner of patent, aimed at circumventing 
winds of every sort, even perpendicular ones. Here 
ends, almost in the heart of the town, this mountain 
railroad flung out into a wilderness of rocks for the sake 
of the silver mines, just as in California a broad, superb 
stage road is flung twenty-six miles out into the Coast 
Eange to carry passengers to the Lick Observatory, on 
the top of Mount Hamilton. 

What is the visitor^s first impression, supposing that 
he knows the past of the Comstock? Not disappoint- 
ment, but a poignant regret, almost strong enough to 
be called a personal sorrow. Wreck, decay, abandon- 
ment, make the dominant note of the scene. Many of 
the great mills stand idle over their vast gray waste 
heaps, rotting slowly down to death and chaos. In- 
side, the stamps hang rusting in long rows, "hung 
up," as the miners say. No clang and clatter is heard 
— no strong, deep roar of the massive machinery 
that filled the canons and the crowded streets in 
bonanza times with constant undercurrents of thrill- 
ing, pulsing sound night and day alike while mil- 
lions of dollars' worth of bullion poured out of the 
smelters. 

The catastrophe — for it is nothing less — does not 
seem to attract any one's serious attention, hardly be- 
comes formulated into a casual phrase. One is told 
elsewhere that " times are dull on the Comstock," that 
Virginia City " is not what it used to be." One hears 
on the Comstock itself that " after a little things will 
pick up " ; that there is plenty of good rock down in 
the mines; that the trouble is with " the ring " — the 
speculators who are trying to control something or 



264: THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

other; that pretty soon the lower levels will he pumped 
out, and work resumed in that most torrid mining helt 
known to modern science; that matters are nearly 
ready for a great simultaneous revival of enthusiasm. 
'Not is this merely the despairing cry of unacknowl- 
edged defeat; it is something almost too sacred to he 
put into words. It is neither more nor less, in its higher 
manifestations, than the suhhme spirit of patriotism, 
defending to the last the lonely mountain fortress of 
the miner State of the Comstock. These men and 
women who huilt Gold Hill and Virginia are uncon- 
sciously loyal to something that never took visible form 
in the chain of American institutional development. 
The township, county, and political state have not be- 
com^e as living realities to them as the laws, customs, 
and social order of the Comstock. The cheerfulness 
and even buoyancy, therefore, with which the com- 
munity as a whole maintains itself is something that 
passes human understanding. 

I stood and watched a man at the ore heap in a 
mill. He was a very strong, tall man, blond-bearded, 
with flakes of gray in his hair; a kindly, sweet-tem- 
pered mountaineer, and he knew the mill and mines 
as a child knows the rooms of the house in which he 
lives. " Our mine is doing a little better," he said with 
a smile of pleasure. " They think up at Opliir that 
they'll strike it rich before any one else, but maybe 
they're mistaken about that." 

Everywhere the same esprit du corps exists; it goes 
far to explain the victories of the Comstock. Every- 
where, in spite of the real decay and wasting plant of 
many enterprises, things are kept in some degree pre- 
pared for the expected revival of mining interests. In 
outward appearances, the community has fallen upon 
hopelessly hard times; but the potential capacity of 



THE COMSTOCK AS IT IS. 265 

mines and mills is still enormous, and if large bodies 
of pay ore were uncovered the really important proper- 
ties would almost instantly resume work at full speed. 
After twenty years of borrasca, an air of constant readi- 
ness still pervades every department. The boys that 
sharpen drills, the bosses and surveyors and superin- 
tendents, all dwell in this hopeful atmosphere and knit 
themselves closer and closer to the thoughts of the 
unknown mine depths. 

Even while this chapter was being written these 
unconquerable Comstockers made a discovery that may 
prove a new bonanza. In previous chapters the forma- 
tion of the chain of mines has been described. In the 
chapter on Sutro Tunnel it was explained that many 
ledges were cut by that great adit, and that some of 
these ledges might prove valuable. As it happens, 
there is a wide ledge of rock, rich in a few places on 
the surface, that lies east of and parallel to the Com- 
stock, the centre ridges of both lodes being perhaps 
a mile apart, and the lodes possibly imiting somewhere 
in the depths. The long-neglected ledge, the Bruns- 
vack, will now be thoroughly explored from end to 
end — a work of many months. Ore now taken out of a 
three-foot vein in the extension of Chollar and in Hale 
and Norcross territory is very rich, and much resembles 
Comstock ore. Being drained at a depth of 1,G00 feet 
by the Sutro Tunnel, water can be handled cheaply 
should bonanzas exist in the Brunswick, and it is pos- 
sible that in a few years a fourth line of deep-mine 
works will be built far east, beyond the long-neglected 
third line of shafts. 

The future is a " sealed seed plot," and no one 
knows what has been sown therein for these great- 
hearted Comstock miners. But how dramatic a pos- 
sibility it is, that while all the world is being stirred by 



266 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

the extraordinary mining events of recent months, not 
only in America, but in nearly every other country 
under the sun, the ancient strength of the Comstock 
is perhaps about to return! 



CHAPTEE XXII. 

THE AMERICAN MINER OF TO-DAY. 

The American miner of to-day is toiling steadily 
on, in his countless camps, making history more rapidly 
than ever before. The yield of onr mines fluctuates 
to some extent, but every decade shows enormous gains. 
According to official statistics, the total value of the 
mineral products of the United States in the two years 
1893 and 1894, the last period for which we have au- 
thoritative data, was, in round numbers, $1,169,000,000. 
This includes the metals, iron leading in value, with 
silver, gold, copper, lead, and zinc follomng in the 
order named; it also includes fuels, structural ma- 
terials, abrasive materials, minerals used for chemical 
purposes, mineral pigments, and many miscellaneous 
products of our mines. 

The vast growth of all departments of American 
mining industry can be plainly illustrated by a few 
statistics. In 1845 the entire United States produced 
but 100 tons of copper; in 1890 a single mine, the 
Calumet and Hecla of Michigan, produced 26,727 
tons; in 1894 the total product of the Unitd States 
was 158,120 tons. The world-famous Calumet and 
Hecla has produced over 500,000 tons of copper since 
its discovery and has paid nearly $45,000,000 in divi- 
dends. In 1825 the lead product of the United States 
was but 1,500 tons; the notable Illinois and Missouri 
deposits brought this up to 30,000 tons in 1845, but 
the annual yield sank to 20,000 tons, and far below, 
267 



268 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

until Eureka, Leadville, Coeur d'Alene, and other 
great groups of mines carried it to the maximum of 
1893 — some 230,000 tons. Similar illustrations might 
be given in every other department of mining. As 
far as civilization is concerned, the iron industry is 
the most suggestive of all. According to Mr, Birken- 
bine's monograph on Production of Iron Ores (United 
States Eeports), the approximate total iron product 
of the world is 57,000,000 tons, of wliich the United 
States, ranking by far the first, produces 16,300,000 
tons. 

Such impressive sum totals may serve to illustrate 
the greatness of these rapidly developing underground 
industries. Better, however, are glimpses of a few of 
the newer American mine groups which are making 
fortunes for men, especially from the precious metals. 
The Cripple Creek district is situated upon some 
rounded hills from seven to twelve miles southwest 
of Pike's Peak, Colorado, at an elevation of from 9,000 
to 10,800 feet. Some early prospectors organized 
Mount Pisgah district here in 1874, but failed to 
handle the ores at a profit. An excitement occurred 
in 1884, when 5,000 people camped here on ^^ salted '' 
claims. Some of these claims afterward proved to be 
valuable, though sold on false pretenses. Along in 1890 
numbers of tenderfeet, or " alfalfa miners," as the pros- 
pectors called them, began to take up claims in the 
twice-abandoned camps. After a while, by a little 
stream in the aspen thickets, a lame burro, a dog with 
a broken leg, and a man with a broken arm are said to 
have given the chief camp its name. Notable discov- 
eries were soon made, changing penniless men into 
millionaires, and by 1894 the Cripple Creek excitement 
was something wonderful to see. 

Cripple Creek mining towns have continued to 



THE AMERICAN MINER OP TO-DAY. 269 

grow since then; ten or twelve camps, with, a total 
population of some 25,000, lie within an area of six- 
teen square miles. Something like a hundred mines 
are shipping ore to the cyanide-process mills at Flor- 
ence, on the Arkansas. The mines in 1892 yielded 
$600,000; in 1893, $2,100,000; in 1894, $3,000,000; 
and in 1895, nearly $8,000,000. This one district has 
made Colorado the leading gold-producing State in 
the Union, the total output of gold in 1895 being $17,- 
340,495. 

Another district attracting attention is the Mercur 
of Utah, in the Oquirrh Mountains, where a Govern- 
ment mule, kicking a piece of rock, revealed the gleam 
of gold to a lucky teamster named Allen. Here, and in 
the adjacent Tintic range, are rapidly growing camps, 
producing half the precious metals of Utah. 

But perhaps no portion of the great mineral belts of 
America is being more rapidly developed at present 
than California, long to some extent neglected, and 
yet possessing many very famous mines and enormous 
undeveloped resources. The noted Idaho and Eureka 
ore body yielded over $11,000,000 in seventeen years, 
and paid over $5,000,000 in dividends. The Hayward, 
the Keystone, and the Oneida of Amador; the Massa- 
chusetts and the Gold Hill of l^evada; the SieiTa 
Buttes; the Plumas Eureka and the Standard Consoli- 
dated, are equally familiar names to California gold 
miners. About eighteen thousand miners are regularly 
employed in twenty-four himdred well-established 
mines, in different parts of the State. The Pacific coast 
north of Mexico, and including Nevada and Arizona, 
has fully a thousand stamp mills, carrying about fifteen 
thousand stamps and costing, with other machinery, 
fully $20,000,000. Half of this investment is in the 
State of California. 



270 THE STORY OF THE MINE. 

The American prospector, cheerful and energetic 
as ever, is at work in hundreds and thousands of once- 
abandoned camps, whose ledges could not be profit- 
ably worked by old methods. He is busy revealing new 
treasures in the islands of Unga and Unalaska, in camps 
along the Yukon, in the south-coast Alaskan gold 
fields, and in British Columbian districts, such as Cas- 
siar. Caribou, and Eossland. Prospectors are searching 
mile by mile the mountains of Washington, Oregon, 
and California, all the way down to the Mexican line. 
The entire length of the great Eocky Mountain min- 
eral belt is being prospected more vigorously than ever 
before. Only the other day, out in the Mojave desert, 
a large district was found, where placer gold and rich 
quartz veins abound and new camps are there being 
established. One of these is called the Eandsburg. 
As usual, stories of the rediscovery of the long-lost 
" Gunsight " and " Pegleg ^' mines come from various 
parts of the desert. Every issue of the mining journals 
contains hundreds of items from new camps, illustrat- 
ing the toils and triumphs of the prospector as he tests 
surface gravel claims, or tunnels for ancient river chan- 
nels under lava beds, as in Idaho, or finds in all sorts 
of unheard-of places the gleam of minerals, useful or 
precious. 

Much has been said in this book about the pros- 
pector, and more might justly be added, for he still re- 
mains the pioneer, differing in essential details from 
the miner, the speculator, and the capitalist. He 
lives a free, careless, outdoor life, and he has blazed 
the trail for others all the way from x\Iissouri and Texas 
to Alaska and Cahfornia. Though better fitted for his 
work than he was fifty years ago, and better supported 
by those who make fortunes from his discoveries, the 
American prospector of to-day has not essentially 



THE AMERICAN MINER _ OF TO-DAY. 271 

changed; he is still a wide traveller, an heroic adven- 
turer, a man of infinite resource and homely, well-tried 
virtues. Sometimes, like Dick Gird, he reaches a dis- 
trict " with a pair of blankets and six dollars in money,^' 
and finds a million-dollar mine; sometimes, like Major 
Eeading, he " loads a train of mules '' with gold nug- 
gets from new placers, but far more often than other- 
wise the wilderness, which takes him to its heart, 
sweetens his many hardships with such devotion to 
his chosen work that all his life he searches for hidden 
treasure, and rarely makes more than his grub stake. 

The whole American mining field broadens year by 
year, not only on the frontier, but in many of the staid 
and long-settled communities. Perhaps, with improved 
methods, even the gold deposits of the Appalachians, 
from N'ova Scotia to the Carolinas and Georgia, can be 
profitably worked on a large scale. The best authorities 
declare that the cost of roasting and chlorinating ores 
in a hundred-ton plant is now less than three dollars per 
ton. By the cyanide process it is even less, in ores 
adapted to this useful method. A few years ago these 
processes cost ten dollars and even twenty dollars per 
ton, but large bodies of low-grade ores, long necessarily 
neglected, can now be handled with profit. 

So promising are recent developments that it would 
not surprise mining authorities if the annual gold yield 
of the United States, British Columbia, and Alaska 
reached the hundred-million-dollar mark by the close 
of the century; nor does it seem unlikely that the total 
yield of different countries will add to the world's gold 
stock within the next ten years more than $2,500,000,- 
000. A period of higher property values and of larger 
business prosperity is clearly indicated by this astonish- 
ing revival of mining interests. Evidently the story 
of the miner and his mines will go on for ages to come. 



272 THE STORY OF THE MIXE. 

I may say, in closing, that there has never been a 
time when so many attractive and important books 
upon mining were being pnbUshed by specialists. Be- 
sides the United States Government Annual and Census 
Eeports and the invaluable volumes of the leading 
mining and engineering periodicals of xVmerica and 
Europe, I note among recent publications Eothwell's 
Mineral Industr}^, Statistical, etc., a masterpiece of 
work; Eissler's Metallurgy of Gold, largely devoted to 
new processes; Hatch and Chalmers's Gold i\Iines of 
the Eand; and Kemp's Ore Deposits of the United 
States. Eeally monumental works upon the history, 
mechanics, and metallurgy of mining are each year 
appearing in greater numbers. The noble industry 
of which I have given only a glimpse is in the hands 
of highly trained speciahsts, and ever}nvhere, from 
the arctic circle to the auriferous conglomerates of 
South Africa, these specialists are shaping its magnin- 
cent future. 



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"7^ HE BEGINNERS OF A NATION. A History 
-^ of the Source and Rise of the Earliest English Settlements in 
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the People. The first volume in A History of Life in the 
United States. By Edward Eggleston. Small 8vo. Cloth. 
It is nearly seventeen years since the studies for this book were beg;un. 
In Januar}', 1880, having: decided to write a History of Life in the United 
States, Dr. Eggleston employed himself during convalescence in seeking 
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United States history is presented here in a light strangely different from 
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of American History in the University of Pennsylvania, au- 
thor of " The History of the People of the United States," 
etc. 8vo. Cloth, $1.50. 

"The book is of gjeat practical value, as many of the essays throw a 
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goal." — Chicago Record. 

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chunks of poHtical information." — Buffalo Commercial. 

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